


Common Prayer

by Amelia_Clark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blowjobs, Divorced Dean Winchester, Episcopalianism, Falling In Love, Happy Ending, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Making Out, Minor Angst, Not a religious fic, Past Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester, Priest!Castiel, Queer Christians, Recovering Alcoholic Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, Smoker Dean Winchester, but a fic with religious people in it, just a nice story about grownups, mechanic!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-09-28 01:01:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20417270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amelia_Clark/pseuds/Amelia_Clark
Summary: Two years after he got divorced and quit drinking, Dean Winchester's still figuring out his new life as sober, single, and bisexual. When he helps Father Castiel Novak, a recently ordained Episcopal priest, change a tire on the church van, they're instantly attracted to each other, and keep finding excuses to meet up again. Neither of them is sure if a relationship between them can work—but as they both find themselves falling hard and fast, they'll have to make it up as they go.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celli/gifts).

> So I signed up to donate a 5-10K word Destiel fic to Fandom Trumps Hate this year...and this is what happened. Thanks go to winning bidder [celli,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celli/pseuds/celli) who, when I asked what she wanted me to write, asked "Is there an AU you've been dying to try?"; [pitytheviolins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pitytheviolins/pseuds/pitytheviolins%22) and K., for beta-reading, cheerleading, and keeping me motivated for months; and Mother J., an Episcopal priest friend who let me pick her brain about church stuff. Any remaining inaccuracies are mine.

Divorce has been good to Dean Winchester.

Not at first, of course. Those first six months, after Lisa told him he needed to move out, he drank more than ever, holed up in a shitty motel room and started a collection of empties to rival his dad’s, brought back a steady stream of one-night-stands he never let stay over. He’s not sure what the tipping point was where he realized he didn’t wanna live like this anymore—maybe it was the defeated look in Ben’s eyes when Dean showed up for visits half in the bag, or the way he’d wake up with his mouth tasting like stale beer and bile—but he knew he had to change things.

And so he did what he needed to do. Moved in with his brother, Sam. Went to a bunch of AA meetings with his not-really-an-uncle Bobby, until they stuck. Finally took Bobby up on his offer to Got on Obamacare and started seeing a therapist, Pamela—he only got so many appointments before the insurance stopped paying, but it’s kind of mind-blowing how much he learned about himself in those appointments, how much of the baggage he’s carried around his whole life got dragged out, opened, and dealt with through Pamela’s patience and pointed, gentle questioning. He still hears her voice in his head sometimes, reassuring him that not everything’s his fault; sometimes he believes it.

One Saturday in late June, Dean’s scowling at the dusty innards of a Ford Focus, about to start the tedious process of tracking down the leak in the HVAC system, when the phone rings in the office. Saturday mornings it’s just him and Bobby, and Dean’s still wiping his hands when Bobby gets to it first. So much for the excuse to take a break; Dean sighs, and he’s just turning back to his work when Bobby covers the handset and beckons him over. “What’s up, boss?” Dean calls.

“Jody Mills on the phone, says she’s got a favor to ask,” Bobby says, then hands him the phone. It’s a black Bakelite phone with a cord; Dean hasn’t seen another one like it since he was a kid.

“Hey, Sheriff, what can I do you for?” he asks, tucking the phone between his ear and his shoulder and rummaging around on Bobby’s desk for a pen. He doesn’t know Jody well, just through his brother, Sam—his job in the Lawrence public defender’s office means he rubs elbows with law enforcement types more than Dean’s really comfortable with—but she seems nice enough.

“Dean?” she says. “Do you remember when I pulled you over going 55 on Poplar, and I only wrote you the ticket for that and didn’t add that your license was a couple weeks expired? Do you know why I did that?”

“Uh, because you and Sam hooked up that time?”

She’s silent for a moment; Dean hears indistinct, youthful voices and the murmur of traffic. “He told you about that, huh?”

Dean winces. “Just that it happened, not…in detail.”

“Well, that’s not why,” she says with a sigh. “It’s because I knew I could depend on you to take care of it the next day. You’re reliable, Dean.”

Dean stifles an incredulous laugh: he is many things, but he sure as hell ain’t _reliable,_ and she knows it. “This must be some favor,” he says.

“Got a flat, I need you to come fix it.”

He scoffs. “I don’t buy it, Jody, there’s no way you can’t change a tire.”

“I certainly can,” she says testily, “if the damn tire place doesn’t screw the old one on with a power drill. They’re not even budging with the tools we got.”

“Okay, fine. Tell me where you’re at.” He still hasn’t found a pen—where the hell’s Bobby keeping them? If the old man’s gonna keep refusing to go digital, he needs to have writing instruments on hand.

“Thirty miles out of town on the freeway?”

“Thirty? Aw, come on, Jody, it’ll take me forever to get that far in the shop truck, why can’t you call AAA?”

“Because I don’t trust whoever shows up not to be an asshole to us for the shop’s screwup. I trust you, Dean. Plus, you’re the best mechanic I know, so of course you’re the one I want to get us up and running. We’ve got places to be this weekend.”

“We?” Dean finally finds a chewed-up ballpoint and scribbles on the edge of Bobby’s desk calendar till the ink starts flowing.

“I coach my church’s summer league volleyball team—they’ve got a game in Pretty Prairie tonight.” She lowers her voice. “The girls are enjoying the wait so far, but between you and me, once they run out of Diet Coke I’m worried they’re gonna turn on me.”

Dean sighs and rubs the back of his neck. Jody doesn’t seem the type to call grown women “girls,” so it’s probably too much to hope for these girls are of dateable age. Whatever that is for him now. 25? “All right, all right, I’m on my way, okay? Hold down the fort, I’ll be there ASAP.”

*******

For all his bitching on the phone, Dean kinda likes doing roadside assistance. He can play his music as loud as he likes while he’s driving, smoke all he wants without Bobby giving him the stinkeye, like Dean’s not gonna quit someday. He just hasn’t yet. And today’s a beautiful day—he’s been looking wistfully out the shop’s front window all morning, as the sun climbed high in the clear blue sky. He turns the truck radio up, rolls the window down, and lights a cigarette, mouths the words to “Immigrant Song” while he heads south towards the mile marker Jody’d given him, now scrawled on a Post-It stuck to the dashboard. It’s fluttering a little in the breeze, but he’s pretty sure the glue will hold.

Thirty miles, two more cigarettes, and a piss by the side of the road later, Dean catches sight of a white van on the shoulder, a factory jack under one side of its front. A knot of teenage girls is sitting in the shade of a windbreak nearby; as Jody predicted, they look hot, tired, and cranky, not like they’re having a good time anymore. Jody herself is leaning on the hood of the van talking to a man facing away from Dean, and it’s him who catches Dean’s eye as he pulls over and parks. The man’s white and dark-haired, pretty tall, dressed in black—and, Dean can’t help but notice, built like a brick shithouse. And he keeps on noticing, as he grabs his toolbox off the passenger seat and hops to the ground, running his gaze over the guy’s muscular arms, his thick thighs in those clinging dress slacks, and Jesus, that ass.

A few years ago, Dean wouldn’t have let himself look.

But a few years ago, Dean was married to someone who didn’t love him anymore, and drunk more often than he was ever sober, so what did that guy know? Dean now, he looks. He hasn’t done more than that in a long while, but it’s progress that counts.

“Hey!” Jody hollers as he heads her way. “Our knight in shining armor has arrived,” she says to the man in black. “Dean’ll have us back up and running in no time, Father.”

The man turns to face him, squinting a little into the sun, and Dean notices two more things: first, the man’s as attractive from this angle as he was from behind, with eyes the same clear blue as the summer sky overhead. Second—and far more startling—is that he’s wearing a clerical collar.

Dean’s been ogling a _priest._


	2. Chapter 2

“Father, this is Dean Winchester,” Jody Mills says. “Dean, Father Castiel Novak. He’s the new guy over at Grace.”

“Hey,” says the handsome mechanic. Dean, setting his giant toolbox down, extends his hard cordially, but Castiel can see the fright in his wide green eyes.

He’s newly ordained enough that the reaction still surprises him. Most laypeople seem to straighten up a bit when he’s around, as if they’re about to be disciplined—the woman pumping gas across from him when he gassed up the van earlier had carefully angled her cleavage away from his line of sight. Some people are like Dean, though, seemingly terrified, and he wonders as he shakes Dean’s hand what his past experiences with clergy have been. “Thank you for coming all this way,” Castiel says, and Dean nods.

“No problem, man,” he says. “I can get you back on the road pretty quick, especially if one of you wants to give me a hand.”

Jody shrugs. “I brought you here, Dean, my work is done. Gonna go see if I can boost the girls’ morale, they have to play this evening.” Castiel watches her join the girls on the roadside, feeling the expected pang of guilt and loss when she sits between her foster daughters. One of those girls, the one with pale blonde braids and a wicked spike, is his niece, Claire, and while he’d jumped at the opportunity to spend time with her on this trip, she has yet to acknowledge his presence. 

“Guess it’s just you and me, then,” says Dean. He pats the hood of the van, twice, like it’s a horse’s flank. “You want me to look under the hood while I’m here, just make sure it all looks good under there? It would suck to take care of the tire and then your radiator conks out on the way back home.” He’s clearly still apprehensive, but he’s starting to relax, in his element now with a vehicular task ahead of him.

“Oh, yes, thank you.” Castiel, on the other hand, is feeling more embarrassed by the second. His ordination has not rendered him immune to anxiety in the presence of attractive men, and Dean is almost cartoonishly butch. Castiel is not only incapable of changing a tire, he apparently should’ve looked under the hood before embarking on this trip, instead of just filling up the tank and squeegeeing the windshield—both preparations of which he’d been proud. Also, he can’t locate the hood latch. He fumbles helplessly for a moment before Dean reaches past him and disengages the lever easily. 

“So new guy gets to drive the van, huh?” Dean says as he surveys the landscape of the engine and Castiel hovers beside him. This close, he smells like motor oil, cigarettes, and gum, a mixture that shouldn’t be as alluring as it is.

“Well, usually our sexton takes care of field trips and so forth, but he’s got the flu.”

“And you pulled the short straw.” Dean fiddles with something under the hood and scowls at it. His hands are large and deft and callused, with faint lines of grease in the lines of his knuckles, underneath his fingernails.

“I volunteered,” Castiel says ruefully. “Trying to impress the boss.”

“Oh?” Dean smiles a little and his eyes crinkle up at the corners—he’s older than he looks at first, then. “I know that one. Was he impressed?”

Castiel winces. “No, she wasn’t.” Naomi had hardly glanced up from her stack of paperwork.

“Bummer.” Dean unscrews the lid to a reservoir of some sort and peers inside. “Well, your transmission fluid’s too dark, see that?”

Castiel leans over to look; the inside of the reservoir is half-full of what looks but doesn’t smell like molasses. “What color is it supposed to be?”

Dean chuckles, not unkindly. “Don’t know a lot about cars, huh?”

“Well, I know how to drive,” says Castiel. “Beyond that, I’m afraid my knowledge of the internal functioning of an automobile is not robust.”

“That’s okay,” Dean says. He’s looking at Castiel but hasn’t turned to face him, gazing at him steadily but sidelong. Castiel gets a general impression of eyelashes and appraisal. “I could teach you some stuff sometime if you want. Might come in handy in your, uh, work, you know, rescue a stranded parishioner or something. You know, like a Good Samaritan. But with cars.” Dean makes a chagrined face at the engine that Castiel’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to see, and something clicks into place.

Is Dean queer? That would explain the anxiety around Christian authority figures—but no, if Castiel’s suspicions are correct, he’s somewhat mistaken the source of Dean’s awkwardness. Maybe the collar’s not off-putting after all; maybe Dean finds him attractive, maybe his offer to tutor him in car repair is an attempt to flirt, to keep him close.

He could be wrong. He hasn’t dated much since starting seminary, but his skills aren’t totally rusty, and he’s pretty sure he’s being hit on in an oblique, plausibly deniable way; meaning that’s probably a good way to respond. “I’d like that, Dean. Give me your phone number and I’ll find some free time in my schedule.”

“Yeah? Awesome.” Dean beams at him—apparently Castiel had not yet been treated to the full force of his smile, because this one’s bright enough to impress its ghost, Cheshire-Cat-like, in his consciousness afterwards. He stands there, blinking, while Dean keeps talking: “Transmission fluid’s reddish when it’s new. The darker it gets, the nastier it is—if it’s black you’re in trouble, but this sh-_crap_ is just dirty. Uh, sorry about that.”

“I do know all the curse words,” Castiel tells him. “I’ve said them out loud, even.”

“Right,” Dean says, rubbing the back of his neck. He leaves a smear of grime from the engine on the side of his neck, and Castiel suddenly pictures, quite vividly, leaning over to wipe it off with his handkerchief. Which is disturbing on a number of levels—for one thing, he doesn’t even carry a handkerchief, and can only assume that he’s remembering a scene from a romance novel, perhaps one where a lonely curate yearns for the village blacksmith. “Anyway,” says Dean, “I hate to send you to the competition, but you should find a chain where you’re at this weekend, just in case.” Dean disengages the hood and closes it with a bang, then pats the hood again affectionately before hefting his toolbox. “Engine’s in all right shape, otherwise. Just need a spider wrench and we’ll do the tire.”

“A spider wrench. Lovely.”

“No, man, you’re gonna love it! All you really need is more leverage than the crappy little lug wrench that comes with the spare, but with a spider you get the added benefit of being able to pretend you’re a vampire hunter.” With a loud, metallic clunk, he finagles a cross-shaped tool from the depths of the toolbox and brandishes it in Castiel’s face with a flourish.

Fighting the urge to burst out laughing, Castiel raises one eyebrow and pointedly looks down at the small gold cross pinned to his shirt front. “Do you have this fantasy often, Dean? That you’re saving the world from some supernatural peril?”

“You’re a tough audience,” clucks Dean, but he wears a sh-_crap_-eating grin as he shoulders the wrench and they approach the flat tire. “Now,” he says, crouching down and taking stock of the job, “I’ll show what you this baby can do.”

Although Castiel is ostensibly there for assistance, he’s clearly unnecessary. Dean insists he try out the spider wrench, to feel the difference in leverage from the factory-provided one, but once he’s taken off the first lug nut, his primary role becomes to hold it—and the rest, as Dean swiftly unscrews them—so they don’t get lost, a function that he does not point out could be ably fulfilled by a pocket. This task requires very little of his attention, and since he’s meant to be watching Dean work, it’s far too easy to fall into watching Dean himself: staring at the muscles of his back as they move beneath his T-shirt, following the path of a droplet of sweat trickling down the side of his face and disappearing beneath his collar. Looking at him, in short, with lust in his heart. 

He should not let this man teach him car repair, Castiel realizes. He has too enough to deal with already, in his first year of priesthood, without adding the complication of romance. At 40 years old, Castiel recognizes temptation when he sees it, and makes the mature, discerning decision to avoid it by telling Dean he’s too busy to take him up on his offer. 

But it would seem strange to just blurt out that he’s changed his mind, and so he waits for Dean to bring it up. And Dean doesn’t, while he finishes up the tire, or after he absent-mindedly wipes the sweat off his face with the hem of his T-shirt, flashing his torso (Castiel sends up a prayer for strength no less fervent for its silence). Instead, when the job is done, Dean grins at Castiel and whistles to get Jody’s attention, waving her over when she looks their way; the girls straggle to their feet, gather their things, and follow her, climbing back into the van with a few murmured thanks to Dean, who’s just standing there, humming under his breath and sneaking glances at Castiel next to him.

Jody lingers outside the van to give Dean a hug, and, Castiel suspect, surreptitiously slip him some cash, bless her—the parish certainly doesn’t have the money for emergency roadside assistance. “I told you he was good, Father,” she says, patting Dean’s shoulder in the same fond way Dean had patted the van. “Don’t you wish he did organ repair, too?”

“Surgery’s out of my wheelhouse, Sheriff,” Dean says. “Sorry.”

“Oh, not that kind of organ,” Castiel interjects. “The pipe organ in the sanctuary has several keys that don’t sound anymore.”

“I’m on the music committee,” Jody explains, “and we’ve raised the money to get it fixed finally, but the only technician in town is booked six months out. So it’s either a rinky-dink Casio keyboard backing up the choir, or the organ missing a note every few lines.”

Dean shrugs and turns to Castiel. “I can take a look. No promises, obviously, but I’m good with mechanical crap, and I like a challenge.”

Castiel should say no, unequivocally. Maturity. Discernment. Avoiding temptation.

“All right,” he says instead. “I’ll have to check with the rector, but I don’t see what harm it could do as long as you don’t take a sledgehammer to anything.”

And so Castiel boards the bus with Dean’s phone number—not, he notes, the shop’s number, but Dean’s own cell—newly entered in his contacts, the question of Dean tutoring Castiel in car repair forgotten. He buckles into his seatbelt and hums the tenor line of a Bach chorale, thinking that he’s weathered the interaction rather successfully; in the future, he’ll simply think of his attraction to Dean as appreciation for the divinely formed human body, in a particularly impressive example. 

Then, as he’s navigating the van back onto the highway, his niece, Claire pipes up from her seat behind him. “So Uncle Cas, we were just wondering: can a priest officiate his own wedding?”

“No,” Castiel says, puzzled but pleased she’s paying attention to him at last. (He’s already given up on persuading her to call him Father.)

For some reason, this makes Claire start laughing hysterically; her foster sister—Castiel thinks she’s named Alex, but he’s heard her called Annie—smirks and says, “I guess Mother Naomi will have to do it, then.”

“Who’s getting married?” Castiel asks. 

“Uh, you and that hot mechanic, obviously.”

“What?!?” Castiel’s grip on the wheel tightens, even as his steering wavers for a split second.

Claire nods and gasps in a breath. “Uncle Cas, you had heart-eyes literally since you saw him, it was amazing.”

“And he kept looking at you out of the corner of his eye whenever you weren’t looking. Like. The whole time,” Alex adds.

He did?

“He didn’t,” Castiel says. “I’m sure you’re mistaken, girls.” He glances quickly at Jody in the passenger seat, seeking backup; she turns pink and looks apologetic.

“He did volunteer awful fast to come take a look at your organ,” she says quietly.

_Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,_ Castiel thinks, and drives. 


	3. Chapter 3

That night, Dean’s banging cupboards in the kitchen when his brother walks in and tosses a wadded-up receipt at him. Dean reflexively tries to catch it but fumbles, and it bounces to the floor, where Sam traps it under his foot. “Stop banging cupboards,” he says. 

“I wasn’t,” Dean says, sullen. “Not that it’s any of your business if I was.” He closes the cupboard door he’s holding with sarcastic gentleness and moves onto the next.

“Christ,” Sam mutters. He goes to the fridge, takes out and opens two bottles. “Are you getting back at me for being such a little shit to you when I was in high school, or did you try to get Ben on the phone again?” Leaning against the counter next to Dean, he sets a Coke down in front of him and sips from the other bottle.

Sam would mention Ben, goddammit. Dean looks at his own Coke and wishes it was a beer. “Neither, actually.”

“Okay. Could be worse, then. Wanna talk about it?”

“Fuck no, I don’t wanna talk about it, Oprah.”

“Oprah hasn’t had a talk show since 2011,” says Sam. “I’m pretty sure you wanna talk about it, Dean. Remember, you asked me to push.”

“Ugh,” Dean says, because Sammy’s right—he can’t afford the therapy anymore, so he knows he’s gotta rely on his support system to help when he’s having too many feelings and doesn’t know what to do with them. He grabs the Coke off the counter and takes a huge gulp, makes a face at the fizz that buzzes through his nose. “I’m going to Hell,” he says.

“Did you sell your soul and not mention it? I thought we agreed you wouldn't do that again."

"Hardy har har," Dean says, but he can feel the corners of his mouth twitching upward. "No, I just spent my afternoon hitting on a priest." He closes his eyes and rolls the cold Coke bottle across his cheek, suddenly flushed when Castiel—_Father_ Castiel—comes to mind. "God help me, Sammy, he was so hot. I didn't know he was a priest at first and then I couldn't un-see him like that."

Sam's the only person he'd say that out loud to. He wonders if that's why he was banging cupboards, to have this conversation he didn't want to have in the first place. Stupid personal growth.

“How’d it happen?” Sam asks. And that’s why Sam is the one he talks to about feelings shit—because Dean can tell him he’s hot for preacher and Sam just wants to hear the details.

Dean tells him the whole humiliating story, not that it seemed humiliating at the time. He’d been dizzy with infatuation and engine fumes, so excited to be flirting with a guy—a guy he was pretty sure, maybe 80%, was flirting back—he forgot that guy worked for the man upstairs. Dean doesn’t believe in God, not really, even though he wants to believe in Heaven so his mom can be there; but he worries deep down that if he does exist, he hates Dean’s fucking guts, and so all the shit that’s happened to him is somehow…righteous. After all, if Dean’s own son thinks he’s a piece of shit, maybe he doesn’t deserve to be saved.

“You said Jody Mills called you out there?” Sam asks afterwards. He’s moved to the rickety kitchen table, where he’s been watching Dean pace and slowly sipping his Coke.

“Yeah, what does that matter?” Dean’s boosted himself up on the counter next to the stove, head slumped back against the cupboards.

“Jody’s not Catholic,” Sam says, “she’s Episcopalian.”

“So?”

“So, Dean, Episcopalian priests can date and get married. You said he flirted back, right? As long as he’s single and into it, you didn’t do anything wrong at all.”

“I mean, he seemed into it at the time, but he couldn’t’ve been, right? He’s a priest, he’s not into dudes.”

Sam sighs. “Episcopals ordain queer people, Dean. Do you really not know that?”

Dean did _not_ know that. How would he? Mom was Catholic, and Dad was…hung over on Sundays. He didn’t actually know there were any Christians cool with people like him. It’s in the Bible, right? He remembers finding that verse while he was bored and flipping through Mom’s, the one where she’s written her name next to his dad’s on the inside of the front cover, with a little line of black ink between them, branching down to add him and Sam. Usually he’d just look at that page, following her round, scribbly handwriting with one finger, but that day he’d found the part about man lying with man or however it starts. That part goes downhill quick, but it’s the first part he remembers, because it sounds nice: lying with a man. Still does.

He thinks about the years he shared a bed with Lisa, how he’d wake before her and just lie there looking at her, wrapped up tight in his arms, the morning light making her skin glow; sometimes, he’d wake her with a kiss, and maybe they’d fuck real quick before work. Probably it’s not so different waking up with a guy, but it’s not gonna be exactly the same either—Dean wants the chance to find out.

Sam’s still talking, and Dean forces himself out of his reverie to pay attention. “So you flirted with a priest, Dean,” he says with the air of someone wrapping up a long monologue. “Chances are good next time you won’t, and you won’t have to see this one again.”

Dean makes a sound like air leaking out of a tire and looks down at his feet; there’s no label glued to the Coke bottle, nothing to fiddle with while he thinks. “I offered to teach him basic car repair.”

Sam groans. “Has that even worked since Amanda Heckerling in tenth grade?”

“He said yes, so I guess it worked today,” Dean says, and can’t resist a little smirk.

“I _told_ you flirting with a guy wouldn’t be that different, didn’t I?” says Sam triumphantly. Ever Dean got sober and admitted he was into dudes, Sam’s been unconditionally loving and supportive, and it grates on Dean’s nerves like nails on a chalkboard. “That patented Winchester charm, works on everybody. You get his number?”__

_ _“Yeah, but—it’s not for a date, or anything,” Dean says. “I’m just gonna show him how to change the oil and stuff. And, uh, I said I’d look at the pipe organ at the church, I guess it’s sort of busted.”_ _

_ _Sam gives him a baffled look. “I didn’t know you knew anything about fixing a pipe organ.”_ _

_ _Dean sighs and buries his face in his hands. “I don’t know a goddamn thing, Sam. You gotta understand, he was _so_ hot, and smart as hell, and I thought ‘hey, I’ll just Google some shit when I get home,’ but all I could think about was Castiel. Father Castiel.”_ _

_ _Sam doesn’t say anything for long enough that Dean starts to panic, because what if Sam’s decided Dean’s damned after all, but when he lifts his head, cringing, he sees that Sam’s lips are pressed together and tilted at the corners—and as they make eye contact, Sam can no longer hold himself back and bursts out laughing. Dean scowls. “It’s not funny!” he says, but that just makes Sam laugh harder._ _

_ _“It’s a little funny,” Sam says finally, when his whoops have subsided. “I mean, you’re gonna go fiddle with his holy organ.” This sets him off again, but he reins himself in more quickly. “It’s not that big a deal, Dean. You met a cute boy and you lost your mind, promised something stupid to impress him. Congratulations, I think that’s being bisexual.”_ _

_ _They order a pizza and play _Mario Kart_ till Sam goes to bed, and neither one of them says another word about Dean's stupid feelings or his humiliating crush. It's pretty awesome, honestly, just what Dean needs to calm down; he moved in at first cause he was broke, but it's got other perks, too._ _

_ _Dean goes out back for his bedtime cigarette—Sam's fussy about his upholstery, and since he paid for it and all, Dean doesn't make waves. (Although there were a few winter days he couldn't face going outside and smoked with his bedroom window cracked, like he’d done as a teenager. He's not proud of it.) He's browsing box scores on his phone when his text alert goes off, from a number he didn't give a name but recognizes instantly._ _

_ _ **Hello, Dean, it's Father Castiel Milton. I wanted to thank you for your help and your advice today, and let you know that I had the transmission fluid changed and took note of the color.** _ _

_ _Dean stares at the text for a minute, sure he's hallucinating its existence. What eventually convinces him it's real was the vocabulary, because at no point in his thirty-two years has Dean's brain produced the phrase "took note of the color." Castiel writes like he talks, and he talks like he's writing, almost like he's learned how to be human from a book. It should be off-putting, but it's kinda cute._ _

_ _Okay, it's really cute._ _

_ _Crushing out his cigarette on the side of a flowerpot, Dean tells himself to calm down. It's not a flirty text at all—dude used his title, for fuck's sake. It's just a thank-you for Dean's advice. Priests just probably go around thanking everybody all the time, to rack up some brownie points with the boss._ _

_ _All he texts back, then, is **no problem glad to help.** Then he smokes another cigarette before turning in, just in case Castiel says something else. _ _

_ _He doesn’t, though._ _


	4. Chapter 4

Although Castiel’s planned itinerary left him plenty of time Sunday morning between driving back to Lawrence and presiding at noon service, said itinerary relied overmuch on the willingness of six teenagers to rise at dawn, perform their ablutions, and pack their things in an efficient fashion, after exhausting themselves in vigorous—and victorious—athletic competition the night before. In short, he built his house on a foundation of sand, and in the end is lucky to pull into Grace’s back parking lot at 11:52. 

“Cutting it mighty close, aren’t you, Father?” says Gabriel, as Castiel hustles into the vestry and locates the necessary apparel as quickly as possible. Already dressed, Gabriel is waiting for go time in the room’s single chair, flipping through a comic book while he eats M&Ms out of a family-size bag on the small vanity beside him. 

Castiel doesn’t quite have a handle on Gabriel yet. He’s Grace’s only deacon, and has been through multiple rectors; consequently, Castiel suspects, Gabriel views most priests as tourists—certainly Castiel himself, a middle-aged convert, must seem fundamentally unserious to a man who’s been serving the poor for fifteen years. Still, Castiel hopes they’ll end up friends.

“I haven’t even been home,” Castiel says to him, tugging his cassock-alb off its hanger and peeling apart a length of Velcro that’s become stuck to itself. “Could you go next door and get everyone lined up?”

“You don’t outrank me, you know,” Gabriel says, but after he tosses one last M&M into the air and catches it neatly in its mouth on the down arc, he leaves for the acolytes’ dressing room next door. Castiel breathes a sigh of relief when he’s gone, and it feels so good he takes another long, deep breath, in and out, before donning his stole and slipping a voluminous green chasuble over his head. 

Dean has green eyes, he remembers; not, of course, the brilliant emerald green of Ordinary Time, only a clear, everyday hazel—and yet they’re vivid enough in their own way, especially paired with Dean’s golden eyelashes and the faded freckles across his nose, to be extraordinary. “Get a hold of yourself, Castiel,” he mutters to his reflection. “You are an earthly representative of Christ, not a fourteen-year-old with a crush.”

Unfortunately, he thinks as he tries to arrange his hair in the mirror, gives up, and goes to take his place at the end of the procession, this reminder of Dean reminds him further that he needs to seek out Mother Naomi after service, to ask if she’s okay with Dean coming to look at the organ. Flushing, he remembers Claire and her friend laughing at this double entendre, and her mortifying assertion that Castiel had “heart eyes” for the handsome mechanic; but the opening chords of the processional hymn save him from this particular train of thought, thank God.

*******

If Castiel’s uncertain of his relationship with Gabriel thus far, he has no idea how things are going with the Rev. Naomi Tapping, rector of Grace Episcopal and his perpetually unimpressed boss. He knows she can be warm—he’s seen her with parishioners—but the best Castiel seems able to elicit from her is civility, and she often seems to be just marking time until their interaction is over, so she can return to a far more important task.

“Yes?” she asks when he knocks on her open office door. The pile of papers in front of her looks like the same one she’d been poring over when he left yesterday.

“I wanted to run something by you.”

She takes off her reading glasses and closes her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she leans back in her chair. “All right, go ahead.”

Well. Not an auspicious start. 

Naomi doesn't open her eyes as he's coming in; her office, which is all windows on one side, is unexpectedly bright after the dimness of the hall, and Castiel blinks to get his bearings as he seats himself in one of the boxy white armchairs in front of Naomi's desk.

"Oh!" he says despite himself as he sits. "This chair is ridiculously comfortable."

Naomi cracks an eye and a smile. "Isn't it? When I inherited this office, everything in here was dark wood like the walls, and even with all the light it felt cramped and sad to me. I've tried to make it more welcoming, and what better for that than a comfortable chair?"

This is the longest thing she's ever said to him not directly related to their work. Encouraged, he explains the situation with the flat tire, the recalcitrant lug nuts, and Dean's offer regarding the organ. "And, of course,” he finishes, “he wouldn't actually do anything until he was confident of managing the repair, so I don't see the harm in it," he concludes.

When he’s done, Naomi presses her lips together and exhales slowly through her nose. “And you would pay him out of the funds raised by the music committee? What happens if he throws up his hands and we don’t have that all of that money to pay someone else?”

“I’ll cover it,” Castiel says with a confidence he does not feel—he has no idea what either Dean or the local organ technician expect to be paid, and his bank account had $37.14 in it this morning. He doesn’t know why, precisely, he would say such a thing, only that Naomi’s money anxieties must not prevent Dean from attempting the job.

Naomi frowns slightly, as if she, too is privy to the precarious nature of Castiel’s finances; but then her face relaxes into an expression blank and unreadable as a communion wafer, and she shrugs. “And you have time to supervise, was it Dan? Dave?”

“Dean, Dean Winchester. Yes, I’ll find time in my schedule to keep an eye on him.” This was the wrong turn of phrase, Castiel realizes as the back of his neck grows hot; he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling and maintains a solemn mien.

“Fine, then,” says Naomi. “But he’s your responsibility, Castiel—I’m already having to work on next year’s budget, which has shortfalls in several areas, and the Diocesan Convention is in three months, so I have a lot of research to do for my committee.” She waves at the stacks of paper scattered across her desk, and Castiel wishes he were better at reading upside down. “I have better uses of my time than shepherding a moonlighting mechanic around the church on the off chance he can bring those notes back from the dead, you understand?”

“Yes, of course. I never intended to imply his presence would require any effort on your part, Naomi. He’s all mine. My responsibility, I mean.”

Naomi nods. “Good, as long as that’s understood. I need you to help me solve problems, Castiel, not invent new ones.”

“Yes, of course,” Castiel says again, even though he’s irritated by her statement: what does Naomi mean by problem-solving, if not finding a way to get the church organ fixed months ahead of schedule?

“Good,” Naomi says, and then she shuts her mouth and just looks at him, mildly, until he understands the conversation is over and he’s been dismissed.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, “I’ll keep you updated.”

“Wonderful,” she says. “You can close the door behind you when you leave.”

He’s just letting the door swing closed—holding onto the big brass handle as it does so to keep the heavy door from slamming to—when he sees Abby Sands and Zachariah Adler, the junior and senior wardens, coming down the hall. The two of them, leaders of the church’s board of trustees, are probably the most powerful laypeople at Grace, and certainly some of the least pleasant: Adler is a bully and a sycophant by turns, while Abby Sands turns every charitable work into a competition, and wins. 

As they approach, Castiel plasters on a smile. “Mr. Adler, Ms. Sands, good to see you today!”

“Likewise, Father,” says Zachariah, clapping him on the shoulder a little too hard; Castiel flinches but maintains his stance.

“I loved your sermon, Father,” Abby says, and she rests a proprietary hand on his forearm for a moment. Castiel has yet to figure out why his parishioners feel so free to touch him—it rarely seems sexual, more like they view him as just another inanimate aspect of the church, a pew or a statue or a lectern.

“Thank you,” Castiel says, meaning it. He’d preached on psalm 43, “As the wild deer,” which he’d first encountered as Palestrina polyphony in the conservatory, and kinds of longing—animal, human, and divine. A good sermon, even if partly inspired by Castiel thirsting after Dean.

“At the 9:00 Eucharist,” grumbles Zachariah, “Mother Naomi chose to focus on the Epistle, and ‘there is no longer male or female.’ Ghastly.”

Abby laughs. “Well, of course she did. She just doesn’t understand, Father,” she says, touching him again—actually surrounding his hand with both of hers—and leaning in close. “We’re here to grow closer to God, not for feminist lectures.” Dropping his hand, she sets off again down the hall without waiting for a response; Zachariah, after a too-hearty handshake, goes after her.

Castiel watches them around the corner, then wipes off the touch of their hands on his slacks, his skin crawling. He knows, of course, that not every Episcopalian approves of women priests, but he’s not sure what it says about him that the wardens would display their misogyny to him so overtly—this had shocked him enough that the words to defend Naomi got stuck in his throat. Next time, he resolves. If it happens again, I’ll tell them they’re wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

The time Castiel gave Dean to meet him at the church on Dean's morning off turns out to be right after some kind of service, because Dean pulls into Grace Episcopal's tiny parking lot as a dozen or so people are leaving. It takes him almost ten minutes to get parked, after a lot of maneuvering his big black Chevy Impala apologetically around old ladies and trying not to block anyone reversing out of the spaces; he's so rattled afterward it takes a whole cigarette before his hands stop shaking, and then he has another one cause he's still nervous as hell.

He eyes the building as he lets a mint dissolve on his tongue; it's worn gray stone, not exactly welcoming but not like one of those warehouse churches, either. There's a bell tower, which is cool, and neatly trimmed flowerbeds. More than one entrance—he aims for the wide wooden doors he saw people coming out of, death grip on the handle of his toolbox, and as he gets closer he sees they're carved with a branches and doves with the words GRACE BE UNTO YOU on top, the seam of the doors cutting neatly between the second and third words.

Dean goes for the UNTO YOU door, but it's locked. Frowning, he tries the other, rattling the handle a little in frustration when it doesn't budge either.

Now what? Should he knock? Should he text Castiel? The guy knew he was coming, maybe Dean's a few minutes late but not too bad. He's standing there, indecisive and annoyed, when the GRACE BE door is suddenly yanked open from the inside, and Castiel's sheepish face appears in the gap.

"I'm so sorry, Dean," he says, holding the door open for Dean to come in. "I forgot these doors lock automatically after Morning Prayer. I hope you haven't been waiting long."

“Nah,” Dean says, irritation gone in an instant. Castiel—who’s just as hot and just as definitely a priest as he was on Saturday, in either the same shirt and slacks or an identical outfit—smiles at him and waves him inside. Dean holds his breath while he steps over the threshold, just on the off chance he bursts into flames; his boots hitting the marble floor of the entryway echoes off the high ceiling, and he exhales all at once.

“Are you all right?” Castiel asks. Going up a couple stairs to another set of double doors, he pulls a ring of keys out of his pocket and starts flipping through them.

“Uh, yeah, just…haven’t been in a church since I got married, you know? It’s a little weird.”

Castiel tilts his head to one side, like a bird or a dog, and Dean could swear he’s frowning a little. “You’re married?”

“No,” Dean says, quickly. “No, not anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” says Castiel. Apparently he’s found the right key, because he unlocks the door in front of him and pulls it open, waving Dean through in front of him again.

“I had it coming,” Dean mutters, too low for Castiel to hear.

The church is hushed and empty, its rows of heavy wooden pews striped with multicolored light coming through the stained-glass windows, and they walk up the aisle together to the altar side by side, like someone’s about to give someone away. Dean hangs back, again, before he steps up onto the altar—it’s set back from the main body of the church, like a stage—so he reaches Castiel when he’s already sitting down in front of the organ’s three-tiered keyboard, where he starts flipping switches, pulling out things Dean’s pretty sure from his research are called “stops.”

And then Castiel starts to play.

Dean's musical tastes run more to classic rock than classical, but he's heard badass organ solos for sure, in Zeppelin and the Doors and whoever did "Whiter Shade of Pale." Castiel doesn't play any of those, obviously, just some old-school piece Dean doesn't know. It's as epic as all of them, though, handfuls of notes and melody lines crossing over each other, and Castiel plays with his whole body, his fingers flying across the keys, his feet moving on the pedals that play the lowest notes like some kind of line dance.

Even while Dean hears the gaps in the music, the notes that aren't getting played that he's supposedly here to fix, it's fucking incredible. This close to the organ, it's so loud it makes Dean's teeth buzz, but he drifts closer, watching Castiel make this beautiful music, and surely, if there really were a God, He would be smiting Dean right now for the gutter his mind is falling into. 

Glancing guiltily at the cross on the far wall, Dean concentrates very hard on not getting a boner in church, and he's caught off guard when Castiel stops abruptly, the last notes he played ringing out over the empty pews.

"Sorry," he says. There’s that sheepish smile again. "I get carried away playing Bach.”

"Yeah, I know how that is," Dean says. “You’re good.”

"I should be," Castiel says, interlacing his fingers to stretch them out. "I have a master's in keyboard performance."

Master's degree, he must mean. "You can do that?"

"Oh, yes." Castiel turns to face Dean, grabs his gaze and doesn't let go. Caught by his attention, Dean licks his lips, not thinking about it, and feels a giddy plunge in his gut when Castiel's eyes flick down to his mouth.

"Do you have a ladder?" Dean asks, after a silence he knows is too long. He leans back his head to scan the rows of metallic pipes above the organ, some of them reaching the ceiling. "I gotta get up there to see what's going on."

"There should be one in the sexton's closet," says Castiel, and he stands, with a little noise under his breath as his knees straighten. "Wait here."

"No, I'll come with," says Dean, in what he hopes is a casual tone. No fucking way he's gonna be in here alone, that's definitely when God's gonna finally smite him for thinking about what a priest looks like naked.

"Sure," says Castiel. "I won't turn down the company."

"So how'd you end up a priest?" Dean asks while Castiel leads him through the building. "If you went to school for music, I mean."

Castiel looks at him over his shoulder. "My sister died," he says.

Smooth move, Winchester. Dean stops himself from cussing just in time. "Sorry I brought it up," he says. "I guess I thought you'd say you couldn't find a job doing music or something."

"I couldn't," says Castiel. "There was a bar down the street from my apartment with a piano, and they'd sometimes let me play for tips, but that was the extent of my professional music career. But it was Hannah’s death that set me on the path to ordination. Last job I had before that was in ad sales." 

“So, what,” Dean says, “she died and you found God, is that it?” He’s not sure he’s successful at keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.

Castiel stops in front of a door labeled SEXTON and starts going through his keys again. “Sort of. Do you really want to hear the story?” He unlocks the door and pulls it open, flicks the switch inside a closet that looks like every janitor's closet Dean's ever seen, except that there's a tiny stained-glass window set high on the outside wall: blue sky, with an angel in flight.

Dean shrugs. “If you wanna tell it, go ahead.” 

“I don’t mind,” Castiel says. He points at a paint-splattered stepladder standing along one wall, and they start wrangling it out from behind a mop bucket and into the hall, where Castiel lifts the front of the ladder and Dean takes up the back. “I was angry when she died, furious,” Castiel explains, as they retrace their steps with their load between them. “It was a car accident six years ago—just someone turning left when they didn’t have room—and I couldn’t understand how such a small, sudden thing like that could take my sister and her wife out of the world and leave my niece without her parents. I was angry at God, and so I set out to find Him. I had this notion, I think, of yelling at Him? Of making Him see, somehow, that the situation was unacceptable, that He needed to fix it.”

“What’d you do?” Dean asks. “Last time I checked, the big guy had an unlisted number.” 

“Well, first I spent several months on a variety of hallucinogens.”

Dean loses his grip on his end of the ladder for a second, catches it again with a jerk. “Really?”

“Really,” says Castiel, grinning at Dean over his shoulder. They stop so Castiel can unlock the church door again, then start up the aisle with the ladder. “It’s a time-tested method of accessing the Divine, you know.”

“Sure,” says Dean, stepping up after him onto the altar. “I saw Laser Floyd on mushrooms once, definitely felt closer to your boss than I ever have in church.” He coughs. “Uh, sorry, forgot who I was talking to for a sec.”

“I don’t mind that you’re not religious, Dean,” Castiel says. Dean’s pretty sure that can’t be right—the dude’s a priest, saving souls for Jesus is his job, right?—but he’s not gonna say anything if Castiel’s not gonna push it. “Anyway,” says Castiel, “I was generally stoned for a while, and that led to reading about visionary experiences of all kinds, and that led me to several Catholic saints. I might have become Catholic if it wouldn’t have meant going back into the closet—that being non-negotiable, when I eventually decided to enroll in the seminary, I chose the Episcopal Church.”

“So you found God,” Dean says. He can’t even begin to approach Castiel’s casual revelation that he’s not straight. Imagine being sure enough of yourself to do that.

“No, not really,” Castiel says, “but I found faith. That’s been more than enough.”

They work in silence to get the ladder set up by the organ, relocating a floor mat from behind the lectern to protect the carpet from its feet, and Dean climbs up high enough to poke his head above the first rank of pipes. “Do you know what notes go where?” he asks.

“Not exactly, but it should be straightforward enough.” Castiel sits back down at the organ and presses a key. “Put your hand over the top of the pipes one by one, when it stops sounding that’s it.”

Through trial and error, they figure out the pattern to which pipes correspond with which keys, and then Dean has to climb down so they can shift the ladder so it’s centered on one of the notes that won’t play. Shining his phone’s flashlight down the tube, he immediately identifies what’s wrong—it doesn’t exactly take an expert. “Uh, Castiel? Father Castiel, I mean?”

“Castiel is fine.” Dean glances down at him; he’s standing by the ladder, one hand resting on the frame just below Dean’s foot. He’s looking up at Dean with the strangest expression, or maybe it’s just a weird way to look at a stranger: curious and worried and soft. 

Dean hates to break the moment, but he does. “The pipe’s full of dead bugs.”

Castiel’s expression changes to confusion. “What?”

“Yeah! There’s this upside-down cone in the top of the pipe, and there’s a bunch of dead moths in it. And some old spiderwebs, it looks like, maybe they spun a web over the top and that’s how all the moths got there?” Dean’s relieved—he read this could happen online while trying to get a sense of what kind of repairs the organ might need, and it’s an easy job, no specialized skills required.

“And that’s it? That’s why the notes weren’t sounding?” 

“Simple as that,” says Dean. “Lemme check the rest of the dead notes, make sure that’s their deal too, and…I guess vacuuming it out would be easiest? You guys got a shop vac?”

“I have no idea,” says Castiel. He still looks stunned to hear it’s such a minor problem, considering; it’s a good look on him, his wide blue eyes like an inland sea Dean could slip and fall into. Suddenly scared he’s actually gonna fall, Dean tightens his grip on the ladder, feeling the blood drain from his knuckles.

Dean swallows and starts to climb back down; Castiel doesn’t step back, so Dean climbs right into his personal space, and he could swear he hears Castiel breathe in, sharply. “Let’s go look,” Dean says, and licks his lips again, deliberately.

He knows he doesn’t imagine the way Castiel’s eyes dart down to his mouth and stay there. They’re close enough to kiss, Dean thinks, and then he can’t stop thinking it. And wondering if Castiel is thinking it too.

Someone has to be the one to step away—they’re in church, for fuck’s sake. So Dean does.


	6. Chapter 6

The morning after Dean's visit to Grace, Castiel wakes abruptly from a dream that he’s holding the bottom of a skyscraping ladder and watching Dean’s ass as he climbs, higher and higher, wearing a pair of tiny red shorts. Still only semi-conscious, Castiel lies in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling and waiting for his erection to go down; eventually, he gives up and thuds one foot, then the other, onto the floor, and pushes himself upright. A cold shower and a cup of strong coffee should chase the last traces of lust from his body and brain, God willing.

There had indeed been a shop vacuum in the sexton's closet, he and Dean had discovered—and although its hose wasn't actually long enough to reach from the floor to the top of the organ pipes, they made it work, Castiel standing below and holding up the canister while Dean wielded the business end. 

They were so involved in this endeavor (no, he could be honest with himself, in each other) that neither of them noticed Abby Sands enter the back of the church, and the sound of the vacuum drowned out her first few calls of Castiel's name. When she finally got his attention, it transpired that Castiel was half an hour late for a meeting with her and the other members of the youth activities committee.

"Remember?" she said, clearly irritated he had not. "We need to brainstorm new fundraisers for the volleyball uniforms, candy bars aren't cutting it anymore. Too many peanut allergies."

"Of course, I'm sorry," said Castiel, but he didn’t move, frozen with the feeling that he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"We're probably done here," Dean said, and started to climb down the ladder; this time, Castiel moved away to give him room. "I can get the stuff back to the closet if I can borrow your key, Castiel."

"Contractors can't have access to keys," Abby said frostily. "It's policy."

So Castiel had to accompany him to the sexton’s closet for a third time, the two of them managing both ladder and vacuum between them while Abby followed, her heels clicking officiously on the hallway tile, her skeptical gaze like a brand on the back of Castiel’s neck. Dean beat a hasty retreat after that, muttering that he’d email an invoice, and Castiel went to his meeting, where he was entirely useless.

Nothing happened, Castiel reminds himself. Perhaps some flirtation, but that's it—nothing inappropriate, nothing at all.

Then why does he feel so guilty?

Grace has no rectory, so Castiel lives in a decades-old duplex three blocks away. It’s not much, but he likes living alone again, after spending his years in seminary too broke not to room with classmates in their twenties—he’s too old to have to label his groceries against pilfering. Here, his only roommate is a battle-scarred tabby tomcat named Lucifer who came with the place; the landlady explained that he’d been abandoned by renters seven years ago and continued to treat the place as his own no matter who occupied it, and sure enough, on Castiel’s first evening he heard scratching at the screen door and Lucifer was sitting on the back patio, flicking his tail and regarding him with glowing golden eyes.

The shower having done its libido-quashing work, Castiel walks into the kitchen rubbing his hair dry with one hand; with the other, he presses the power button on his coffee maker and opens the back door for Lucifer, who rubs his side against Castiel's bare calf once on his way to the empty food bowl. He meows, a sound like a rusty gate closing. Castiel makes the noise back at him, and the cat thumps the end of his tail in indignation.

"My accent's not getting any better, huh?" he says through a yawn, as he pours a scoop of kibble in Lucifer's bowl. The cat's crunching away before he's poured it all in, and allows Castiel to stroke him twice, before warning him to stop with a low yowl. 

As usual, Castiel drinks his first cup of coffee while it’s still too hot, clutching the mug in both hands and taking tiny sips while he watches Lucifer, having gulped his breakfast, perform his morning ablutions in a convenient patch of sunlight. He’s just poured a second cup and is considering the possibility of food himself when he’s surprised by a text from Dean.

**hey cas when do you wanna do cars 101?**

A few seconds later, a second message follows: **sry ok if I call u cas?**

**Hello, Dean,** Castiel texts back. **Cas is acceptable.** In fact, he likes that Dean’s given him a nickname, the same one his niece uses; it feels like a stamp of approval, an intimate claim on Castiel’s person that reveals a tacit intention of continuing their association.

Or, more likely, Dean wasn’t sure how to spell “Castiel,” and improvised in the moment. The single S is unusual: when Castiel shortens his name at Starbucks, nine times out of ten he receives a cup with “Cass” written on it, a spelling which never fails to raise an involuntary shudder. Dean has, at least, hit upon the spelling Castiel would use, and Castiel is inordinately pleased by this—by Dean’s texting at all so soon, as if he’s also impatiently looking forward to their next encounter. 

**cool. u could come by the shop some time after close at 7? whatever day works.**

Castiel’s aware of warning bells going off in the back of his head—this entire scenario is proceeding exactly as he originally feared. Their mutual attraction is clear and will only intensify if they continue to spend time together, particularly alone; and while right now it would be simple to take a step back, to put off the invitation for long enough that perhaps Dean will lose interest, later on extricating himself could be complicated and painful. He’s a grown man, and he knows this.

But if he’s a grown man, it also stands to reason that he can maintain a modicum of self-control—he’s not going to be so overcome by Dean’s beauty that he tears his clothes off and fellates him on the spot. Besides, persevering through temptation is important spiritual discipline, isn’t it? And car repair a useful skill. 

**I’m free tonight, Dean. Where is your shop?**

*******

When Castiel pulls up to Singer Auto Service & Salvage at 7:04, Dean is waiting for him outside, leaning against the building with a cigarette. He’s wearing stained navy blue coveralls, unzipped to the waist, over a faded Iron Maiden T-shirt; the angle of the sunlight coming from the west limns his profile with molten gold. The sight of him literally takes Castiel’s breath away, as if he’s been punched in the stomach but feeling pleasure rather than pain.

At Castiel’s appearance, Dean peels his shoulders off the wall and straightens up with feline grace, grinding his cigarette out beneath one work boot before sauntering over to Castiel’s old pickup, his lovely mouth splitting the difference between a smirk and a grin. “Heya, Cas, nice to see you in civilian duds for a change,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Ford man,” he says. “You know I got a Chevy, so now we have to fight.”

Castiel raises an eyebrow. “I assure you, I have no interest in defending a virulent anti-Semite like Henry Ford and so shall award you the victory by forfeit.”

Dean laughs. “You crack me up, man. I love the way you talk.”

He stops and bites his lip, as if he hadn't meant to say that out loud; Castiel can't help but look, and keep looking, fighting the urge to free Dean's lower lip with his thumb and run his tongue over it, slowly.

Dean fiddles with the pull of his zipper, lip still caught in his teeth, before yanking it up decisively and folding his arms. "Anyone ever told you you stare?" he asks.

“I don’t,” says Castiel truthfully. “It’s just you, I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t say I minded.” Dean unfolds his arms, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and stares Castiel down.

"Would you like to have dinner with me, Dean?" Castiel asks, surprising them both.

Dean takes a step back, then rocks forward again towards Castiel. “You serious? Dinner like a date, with me?”

“Yes,” says Castiel—and it’s strange, although he’s taking a leap of faith that things will turn out, against his own predictions, he suddenly feels back on solid ground. “I’d rather take you to dinner than learn car repair.”

“You wanna go now?” asks Dean, sounding panicked by the possibility. “I ain’t exactly dressed for dinner.”

“Are you saying yes?”

Dean nods and ducks his head, smiling a little and then sighing. “Yeah, Cas, okay. You can take me to dinner, but there’s some stuff I wanna tell you first. Wanna come inside?”

*******

“So I told you I was married.”

They’re standing by a dented card table in the back corner of the shop, next to a couple of vending machines, a microwave atop a dorm fridge, and a coffeepot whose pitch-black brew smells like burnt aluminum foil; Dean refers to this as “the break room” despite its lack of walls to separate it from the service floor, now half in shadow and still as the grave, populated with the huge dark shapes of cars and equipment like drowsy leviathans.

“You mentioned it,” says Castiel, surveying the choices on offer in the vending machines. “I’m going to get something to eat and drink, if you don’t mind. Do you want anything?”

“Ate already,” Dean admits. “Brown-bagged a PBJ, didn’t expect you to ask me out.” On the last three words, the volume of his voice drops to a stage whisper.

“Dessert?” Castiel purchases a bag of potato chips, opting for plain over sour cream and onion after considering the latter’s likely effect on his breath.

“Wouldn’t say no.” Accepting the M&Ms Castiel throws to him a moment later, Dean sits in one of the mismatched folding chairs around the table and stretches his legs out, crossing them at the angle as he tears the candies open and pours some out, pushing them around on the table’s surface to arrange them by color as he talks. “I got married when I was 19, I got un-married for good two years ago. Six months after that I quit drinking.” He stops and raises his eyebrows at Castiel, waiting for a response.

“I don’t see why it would matter to me that you’re divorced, considering how the Church of England was founded,” Castiel says, and immediately feels like an ass when Dean frowns in confusion at the reference. “The Pope refused to let Henry VIII divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn.”

“Sure, whatever,” Dean says, dismissing the entire English Reformation with one swipe of his broad hand in midair. “The divorce was my fault, though—she’s a fucking saint, put up with my drunk ass long as she could before she threw me out, and that still wasn’t enough to get me to clean up my act right away.”

“Why did you marry so young?” Castiel asks.

Dean scowls and flicks a red M&M across the table; it’s headed for the edge when Castiel traps it under his palm. “You know why,” Dean says.

“She was pregnant,” Castiel says gently.

“Bingo.” Dean watches Castiel pick up the M&M and eat it; the look on his face is utter defeat. “I knocked her up summer after high school, did the right thing and proposed. Except it wasn’t the right thing, and she got stuck with me for ten years.”

“How old is your child?”

“Ben’s twelve, he turned twelve last month. Awesome kid, lives with his mom in Indiana.” Dean lets out a gulping laugh that’s half sob. “Haven’t wished him happy birthday, though, cause he won’t talk to me for the last six weeks. Won’t even get on the phone, no matter how his mom hollers, and it’s not like I can fucking blame him.” A tear trickles halfway down his nose before he knuckles it away. “I’m not exactly a catch, is what I’m saying. Especially for a fucking priest.” Dean coughs as if to retroactively muffle his profanity. “Sorry I said ‘fuck’ a bunch of times.”

“I told you, I know all the curse words, and I really don’t care.” Castiel keeps his tone light while his heart aches for Dean—for Ben and his mother, too, of course, but he finds it difficult to think about them when Dean is right there, back to meeting Castiel’s eyes with his own exhausted, red-rimmed ones. “I’m sorry your son is angry with you right now, Dean, but I’ll bet it’s only temporary. I’m sure that Ben still loves you, even if he’s resentful of how your decisions have affected him.” Guilt knots his stomach for a moment; he thinks of Claire, how she’s kept him at arm’s length since he chose to go to seminary rather than become her legal guardian, and he desperately hopes that his words hold true for both of them. “And I’d still like to take you out, if you’re interested.”

“Of course I’m interested,” Dean says to the remaining M&Ms, which he’s arranging in a lopsided triangle. “I just want you to know what you’re getting into.”

“All right—you’ve been married, you have a child, you’re recently sober. I’m none of the above, but I’m not going to hold any of it against you.” There’s two M&Ms left, and Dean wordlessly pushes one across the table, eyebrows raised in question; Castiel shakes his head. “Any other important information you think I need to know?” he asks Dean, who shakes his head. “Good. Then I suggest we call it a date.”

Dean sits up straighter in his chair, as if he’s just had an idea. “Why don’t we call _this_ a date?”

“What?”

“Tonight. You came to meet me at work, you bought me food, you listened to my sob story, that sounds like a first date to me. So the pressure’s off, see? Next time we get together it’ll be our second date, way less stressful.”

“That’s a good idea. Thank you, Dean, I’ve had a wonderful time.” Castiel smiles and puts his hand on one of Dean’s where it rests on the table; Dean flinches slightly, but doesn’t move away.


	7. Chapter 7

It’s Saturday night—well, evening anyway. Dean’s got a date with a priest in a couple of hours, and while he doesn’t miss the hard stuff as much as a six-pack after a long day, right now he’d give his left nut for a shot of whiskey to calm his nerves, cause cigarettes ain’t cutting it. Plus it’s getting to be time to knock those off if he doesn’t want to smell like an ashtray at dinner; if he’s lucky and Cas kisses him, he doesn’t want to taste like one either. 

Fuck, he hopes he gets to kiss Cas tonight. They’d hugged goodbye at the end of their “first date”; Cas’s arms were strong and warm around him, and Dean wanted to stay there for hours. He can’t believe Cas is still into him after hearing what a shithead loser Dean really is, and he doesn’t even know how new Dean is at the whole bi thing; Dean decided to limit his own humiliation, figuring he’d poured out enough of his guts already.

He needs a distraction that’s not smoking or changing his shirt, because he’s done that twice, and Sam made fun of him before telling him to keep what he had on because “you look good in green.” Cas’d been wearing green yesterday, a T-shirt under a red hoodie, with jeans, and seeing him in civvies is probably what scrambled Dean’s brain so he told Cas about Lisa and Ben and the booze. Why didn’t that scare him off? Was Dean _trying_ to scare him off by telling him?

“Shit,” Dean mutters to himself. Someone needs to talk him down, he knows, and Sam’s gone back out to get his own food for tonight. There’s only one other person who’s known him anywhere near as long as Sam, and that’s his ex-wife; before he really thinks about it, he’s dialing her number.

Lisa picks up after a few rings. “Hi, Dean,” she says, sounding cheerful but distracted—her usual tone of voice these days, with Ben hitting middle school and her yoga studio finally close to being profitable. “If you’re trying for Ben, he’s sleeping over at a friend’s house.”

“Like he’d wanna talk to me anyway,” Dean says. He’s in his room, sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, and he flops dramatically back on the mattress with a sigh, indulging for a second in feeling sorry for himself.

Lisa makes a sympathetic noise. “Give him more time,” she says. “He doesn’t hate you, he’s mostly trying to assert his independence.” She’s been telling him this since the first time Ben wouldn’t come to the phone, and it almost makes sense—it would if Dean were a good guy whose marriage just fizzled out, but he’s not. He’s the piece of shit who chose drinking over his family, and Ben’s got a right to hate him.

“I was calling for you anyway,” he says, pushing the self-loathing to the back burner in his brain where it simmers pretty much constantly. 

“Oh? What’s going on?” 

Dean chews his lip and blurts it out. “I got a date tonight, Lis. I got a date with a guy for the first time, and I’m kind of freaking out about it.”

Lisa doesn’t speak right away, but she hums a little, to let Dean know she’s thinking; she knows silence makes him nervous, makes him imagine every possible shoe that might be about to drop. Right now, he’s worrying about what Ben might think of him if he knew Dean was into dudes—maybe he does know, maybe he found out and that’s when he cut Dean off. “Are you freaking out because your date’s with a guy, or because it’s your first first date since high school?” she says at last.

Huh. “Huh,” he says, “has it really been that long?” It has been, he knows, because that date was with Lisa, for senior prom 2006; he’s fucked around some since they split up, but never in a situation that could realistically be called a “date.” 

“Yeah, Dean, it has. I can’t speak to all of what you’re feeling, I know, but I do know how you feel about getting back out there. Dating as an adult sucks,” Lisa says, and laughs. “No, sorry, that’s too harsh. It’s better in a lot of ways, actually, no one has a curfew and you don’t have to have sex in cars. But it’s different, and it’s new, and those are hard things to negotiate, and that’s what sucks. Also men are still dogs in their thirties, but you knew that.”

“I called for a pep talk, you know,” says Dean. 

“You should’ve asked for one, then. How’s this: just be yourself, Dean, it’ll be fine. You’re hot and charming and kind, and anyone of any gender would be lucky to date you.”

Dean exhales noisily, like he’s been holding his breath since he got on the phone. “Thanks, Lis. I don’t deserve you. Never have.”

“That’s not true,” she says. “Try to go out tonight thinking you deserve good things, Dean, okay? Take care of yourself.”

“You too. Thanks again.” He hangs up, feeling much calmer.

*******

By the time Dean parks at the curb in front of Cas’s place, though, he’s feeling jumpy and cornered again. He sits in the car for a minute, listening to the engine ticking as it cools, and makes eye contact with the enormous, scruffy brown cat crouching on Cas’s stoop. The cat thumps its tail once on the concrete and twitches an ear; when Dean gets out of the car, it lets out a raspy meow and runs over to him like they’re old friends, twining itself around and through his legs as he comes up the walk, nearly tripping him at every other step.

“Lucifer, leave him alone!” scolds Cas, opening the door before Dean can knock. “He wants you to feed him, but he’s _had_ dinner,” Cas explains, and bends to scratch the cat between his ears. “You’re the Prince of Lies, aren’t you, Lucifer?” 

“A priest has a cat named for the Devil?”

Cas shrugs one shoulder. “He lived here before I did—if anything, he has me.” He gives Lucifer a last rough pet, and the cat seems to understand this as a dismissal, stretching full-length back and then forwards on his front legs before leaping off the stoop and streaking off into the bushes. “I just need to get my shoes on and I’ll be ready to go,” says Cas, looking down at his black-socked feet. “Do you want to come in?”

“Nah, I can wait,” Dean says. Cas nods, leaving the door ajar behind him when he goes back inside; Dean can hear him whistling inside the house, a snatch of melody Dean thinks he recognizes from the Bach piece Cas played on the pipe organ, and he shivers, remembering how Cas gave himself over so entirely to the music, wondering what it would be like to have that attention fixed on him, to feel Cas’s skillful hands moving over Dean’s body. He stuffs his own hands in his back pockets and fights the urge to flee.

But Cas reappears quickly. He’s put on not only his shoes but a dark blue tie, knotted slightly off center over a tucked-in white button-down, which makes Dean feel underdressed in his untucked green plaid one. “All set,” he says, his smile wide; Dean gets caught in the way Cas’s eyes crinkle at the corners, wanting to trace the lines with a fingertip, and he can’t answer. They’re locked into one of those stares that are already a thing with them, and then Cas reaches up and flips his tie wrong way round and back again a couple of times.

Oh, thank fuck, he’s nervous too.

Dean has a moment of panic when they reach the car—should he hold the passenger door open for Cas?—but he realizes he has to unlock it anyway, so why not. Cas murmurs his thanks as he climbs in, and Dean just nods, closes the door a little too hard. He can feel Cas’s eyes following him as he rounds the Impala’s hood and gets in himself, but he keeps his own gaze strictly on the road as he starts up the car and pulls away from the curb. “Where to, Cas?” he says.

“Do you like Italian? There’s a place on 2nd that makes its own pasta, I’ve been meaning to try it.”

“Yeah, Angelo’s, I know it.” It was Lisa’s favorite; he took her there for their anniversary every year except the last one, when things were bad enough neither of them felt like celebrating. Or talking to each other, honestly.

“Dean? Are you all right?” Cas’s voice is pitched like he’s repeating himself, and Dean realizes he’s still idling at the stop sign at the end of Cas’s block. Even after he notices, he can’t do it. Can’t turn left towards Angelo’s. Can’t think of the name of any other restaurant to suggest, Italian or not. He jumps when Cas rests his hand on his upper arm; the gentle touch burns through the fabric of Dean’s shirt and tingles on the surface of his skin. “Dean?” Cas asks again.

“I didn’t tell you everything,” says Dean. “I didn’t tell you—this is kinda new, for me.”

“You haven’t dated a man before?”

Dean winces. “Define ‘dated.’”

“Ah,” Cas says, like he gets it.

Dean says it out loud anyway: “Right after Lisa gave me my walking papers, I did…look, I was a crappy husband in a lot of ways, but I was always faithful, I didn’t fuck around on her with guys.”

“I didn’t think you did. Do you want to go back to my house and tell me about it?” Cas’s hand is still on Dean’s arm, and he’s absently rubbing his thumb back and forth, like that doesn’t make Dean’s mouth go dry with want.

“What about dinner?”

“It won’t be like Angelo’s, but I can make you pasta,” Cas says. “A perfectly fitting second date.”

There isn’t really much more to tell. The invitation isn’t something Dean can turn down, though—so he pulls a U-turn in the intersection and maneuvers the Impala back to Cas’s place, and hovers uncertainly behind Cas on the stoop as he unlocks the door. It opens directly into a square, spare living room with blond wood floors and an L-shaped couch facing an overstuffed bookcase with a TV on top; Dean can see a kitchen through one archway and a hallway through the other, and he tries not to stare down the latter, knowing that’s where Cas’s bedroom must be. 

Instead, he follows Cas into the kitchen, where he finds a place out of Cas’s way while he puts on water for pasta; Dean leans against the counter with his hands in his pockets and watches Cas move about his own space. He’s not exactly graceful, but there’s something about how Cas interacts with the world that’s beautiful to watch, how he touches everything like it’s important, like it’s a miracle. Dean thinks again about Cas touching him. Kissing him. Bending him over the counter and fucking him while the pasta boils to mush.

“I don’t want to presume,” Cas says as he dumps marinara out of a jar into a saucepan, “but I think you’re trying to saying that you’ve previously had sex with men, but not in a romantic context.”

“Uh, yeah, I guess you could put it like that.” It’s a lot classier than anything Dean would’ve come up with, anyway. “Like I said, I wasn’t gonna cheat on Lisa, realizing I was into dudes too didn’t change that. When she kicked me out, I went a little, uh, for a while I was hooking up with a lot of people. A few women, but mostly…guys are so _easy,”_ he says, and Cas laughs.

“We certainly are,” he agrees, shooting Dean a sidelong glance, and Dean’s stomach flips. “So these encounters were primarily sexual?” Cas asks, as casually as if he’s asking Dean what traffic was like on the way over—sometimes he’s so goddamn jealous of confident gay dudes, the ones who knew when they were eight years old and never wavered. Cas has that look, like he’s only ever been himself, instead of being marked like Dean by the lies he’s told himself.

“Yeah.” Dean shifts his feet uncomfortably. “I mean, usually we talked some first, but we weren’t gonna go to a movie and hold hands or nothing.”

“Or have dinner?”

“Yeah. No dinner.”_ Unless you count eating ass,_ an unhelpful part of his brain supplies.

“And you thought I would judge you for that?” asks Cas. “Dean, I’ve only been a priest since March and I’m 40 years old. I’ve had plenty of casual sex, it just hasn’t been recent.”

“Plenty?” Now Dean’s back to worrying that he hasn’t fooled around with enough guys to be any good at it yet; he thinks he got generally good reviews, but he was drunk for an awful lot of it, and some of the individual acts are pretty hazy.

“I could use the word ‘sufficient’ if you’d rather. And as I said, not recently. Nothing recently.”

“Me neither.” Not since he got sober, in fact; he wasn’t hanging out in bars anymore, and Grindr was frankly overwhelming—call him old-fashioned, but he prefers a “hello” to a dick pic as an opening gambit. Cas always says hello.

Not that he doesn’t want to see Cas’s dick, of course. He wonders if that’s in the cards tonight, especially now they’re in Cas’s house—he can guess that Cas isn’t supposed to fuck on the first date, but what about the second? Ugh, he needs to use his words, like Pamela always said. 

“Hey,” he says, and cringes inside at how fake-casual he sounds. “What can you do?”

Cas is reaching over his head to grab a box of pasta off a shelf. “What do you mean?”

“What can you do, you know, with me.” _To me,_ Dean thinks.

Cas freezes for a second, then slowly sets the pasta down on the counter and turns to face Dean. “Sexually, you mean,” he says, and waits for Dean’s nod. “The canons prohibit sexual conduct ‘unbecoming to the clergy,’ so that means, obviously, no adultery, no relationships with minors or anyone under my pastoral care.”

“Okay,” says Dean, swaying away from the counter and taking a few steps towards him, “but I’m not any of those things.” 

“Beyond that, there are no official guidelines, so…it’s all very vague and debatable. My boss knows I’m gay, so that’s not a problem, but I certainly haven’t asked what her expectations are if I were dating.” Cas sighs. “The truth is, Dean, I'm not sure yet. I hadn’t planned to date this soon into my priesthood.”

Dean smirks. “But I’m irresistible, huh?”

“Nearly,” Cas says. He moves closer to Dean, nudging him back against the edge of the counter again, boxes Dean in with his arms but doesn’t touch him. “Thus far I’ve been able to exercise a measure of self-control.” He leans forward, his breath hot against Dean’s ear. “Otherwise we would already be in bed.”

“Oh God,” Dean gasps. How can he be this turned on when Cas has yet to lay a hand on him? 

Steam starts pouring out from underneath the lid to the pasta pot as the water hits a boil. “I feel sure,” says Cas, looking straight into Dean’s eyes from six inches away, “that it would not be unbecoming for me to kiss you.” He puts his hands on Dean’s hips, carefully. “May I kiss you, Dean?”

Dean answers by grabbing Cas’s tie and pressing their mouths together.


	8. Chapter 8

Dean’s mouth is warm and velvet-soft. Though he initiates the kiss, at the press of Castiel’s tongue, Dean’s lips fall open on a sigh and he melts against him, dropping Castiel’s tie to slide his hand around to the nape of his neck. His fingers dip under Castiel’s collar, raising prickles on his skin, and Castiel digs his own into Dean’s hips, keeps kissing him deep and slow until he’s hearing music: orchestra and chorus, Schiller and Beethoven, the climax of the Ninth with its violent overflow of joy. 

He can’t recall why he thought this was such a bad idea.

“Hey,” says Dean into Castiel’s mouth, “hey, you know the water’s boiling, right?” 

“It’s not a priority,” Castiel says, stumbling forward so their groins are pressed together. The noise Dean makes at that is more beautiful than all the symphonies Beethoven ever wrote; he mouths at the delicate skin over Dean’s hammering pulse in an effort to elicit it again. Dean grants his wish, whimpering as he clutches at Castiel’s biceps and lets Castiel incline him backward over the counter, tilts his chin up so Castiel can kiss the hollow of his throat.

“You’re so hard,” Dean whispers, after they’ve been at this a while. 

It’s enough to pierce the fog of lust, remind Castiel that he doesn’t want to do this thoughtlessly—doesn’t want _Dean_ thoughtlessly—and he steps back with alacrity, takes his hands away. “I’m sorry,” he says, breathless. “I got carried away.”

“Don’t be sorry on my account,” Dean says, wiping a hand across his face; he bites his bottom lip, winces, runs his fingers over it with a look in his eyes approaching wonder. “That was—I ain’t been kissed like that in a long time. Don’t say you didn’t mean it.”

On the stove, the water’s still boiling, and instead of touching Dean again, Castiel fumbles to turn it off, spins the dial all the way around before he clicks it successfully to off. “Well,” he says, “I meant to kiss you, but not to take it farther than that.”

“You didn’t, though,” Dean says, and laughs. “That wasn’t even second base, dude, unless you’re worried about saving room for the Holy Spirit I think we’re good.”

“I know I must seem ridiculous to you,” says Castiel. He certainly feels ridiculous, and covers inadequately by refreshing the pasta water, half boiled away while they kissed and now much too salty. “But, Dean, I’ve known you for a week, and I’m a priest, and I don’t even know if my boss likes me—not that that _should_ matter, but in reality her disapproval could make my job hellishly difficult.”

“Cas, it’s okay if you wanna take the physical stuff slow,” says Dean. “Priest or not, I don’t want you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable, even if it’s,” Dean swallows, “I really liked it when you were kissing my neck. I’d be bummed if you decide that’s over the line for now, but I’ll follow your lead.”

Castiel sets the pot of water back on the burner and considers Dean’s words, slides his gaze down Dean’s neck to his collar, disarranged by Castiel’s searching mouth; there’s the faint impression of teeth on one of his collarbones, though Castiel doesn’t remember biting. But he remembers the taste of Dean’s skin, a mundane blend of soap and salt, and he approaches Dean again, stays at arm’s length but reaches out to press two fingers over Dean’s pulse, looks him in the eye while he brushes his touch down Dean’s throat, stopping where his shirt starts. “The water should take about ten minutes to boil. In the meantime, why don’t you show me exactly where on your neck you’d like to be kissed, and I can evaluate firsthand the experience of doing so.”

Surprise flashes across Dean’s face before he breaks into one of those dazzling smiles. “Sure,” he says, and pulls Castiel into his arms. “That’d be awesome.”

*******

Ultimately—although the first batch of sauce turns to burnt sludge—the pasta is successfully made and consumed, in between bouts of kissing and light groping. They sit cross-legged on the floor on either side of the coffee table, and can’t stop smiling at each other while they eat, twirling noodles with one hand and letting the fingers of the others interlace on the table between them; afterward, they make out on the couch for another half hour, until it’s clear to them both where things are going if Dean doesn’t go home. So he does, after a dozen goodbye kisses at the door, and Castiel goes to bed in a haze of contented arousal. 

However, in said haze he forgets to activate his morning alarm, and consequently finds himself late to preside at the noon Eucharist again. Rushing into the vestry, he finds Gabriel once more awaiting him; the deacon raises an eyebrow as Castiel enters. "Do we need to pass the plate to buy you a wristwatch?" he asks, voice dripping with disdain.

"I'm sorry," is all Castiel can offer; this only elicits a shrug, and his further plea that Gabriel herd acolytes gets him an ironic salute before Gabriel leaves. It's disrespectful, but only to Castiel himself; his own tardiness, he fears, offends Someone far greater.

Thus, he makes a conscientious effort to be on time for all his pastoral obligations that week, whether it be meeting with a couple planning to be married in the fall or his weekly night shift baking bread at the ecumenical soup kitchen downtown. His schedule doesn’t leave much spare time, but he and Dean manage to go out for dinner the weekend of the Fourth, then spend the better part of an hour kissing furiously in Dean’s car, like a couple of teenagers; Dean keeps grabbing at the fabric of Castiel’s clothes instead of his body, twisting a fistful of shirt as Castiel’s mouth moves down his neck, making soft, high-pitched noises in the back of his throat. Castiel hasn’t wanted someone this badly since—well, possibly never. 

Another week flies by, and it’s Saturday afternoon in the public park near Grace, at a cookout raising money for the volleyball team’s new uniforms. Unsure of his exact role in this event, Castiel wanders over to one of the grills, a battered metal box Claire is currently cleaning. "Do you need a hand with anything?" he asks hopefully. 

She shrugs and continues scrubbing the grate. "You can scoop out the ashes when I'm done with this, if you insist." Her tone conveys utter indifference to the possibility, and Castiel sighs internally.

"Is it always going to be like this, now, with us?" he asks.

Claire stops and frowns at him, pushing a sweaty strand of hair off her forehead. "Like what, Uncle Cas?"

Castiel thinks of reassuring Dean that his son would forgive, and suddenly, although it's a poor venue for a heart-to-heart, he finds all his pent-up emotion pouring out: "I'm sorry I wronged you, Claire. I knew that you needed me when your mothers died, and I wasn't there for you, and I need you to tell me what I can possibly do to atone, because I can't stand having you angry at me, however much I may have earned the sentiment—because I love you, Claire, you're like a daughter to me."

"Whoa," she says, stopping the flow of words with a hand on his arm. "Slow down, Uncle Cas, count to 10 or something. First of all, I'm not mad."

"But—you keep brushing me off," he says, bewildered. "Every time I've seen you lately, you barely speak two words to me."

Claire rolls her eyes Heavenward. "Yeah, Uncle Cas, cause you keep trying to hang out with me at church stuff. Where you're sort of at work always so you're kind of everybody's, everybody calls you “Father” and it's super weird, okay?" 

Her hair has migrated back to her forehead and she pushes it back again, leaving a smudge of soot behind. "And I don't even know where that stuff about my moms came from, Jesus—sorry, ugh," she grimaces, "you see what I mean, I'm apologizing for not even a real swearword."

"I do know all the curse words," he says automatically, and then, because he still can't wrap his head around it, "you're really not angry at me for not adopting you? I thought—I believed you felt abandoned."

"I did at the time, sure. I was ten, and I was angry at everything for a while, so yeah, I was angry at you." She shrugs. "Maybe I'd feel different if things had turned out worse for me, I don't know. But Jody's great, and I like having a sister, and I don't spend my time wondering about what if you'd taken me in, because you didn't, and I'm fine."

"You're fine."

"Yeah, Uncle Cas, I am. Are you?" Castiel nods slowly. "Good. Gimme a hug, you dork." She stands on tiptoes and puts her chin on his shoulder, squeezes him around the neck, and steps back. "Okay, if that's settled, I think that's as clean as the grate's gonna get, you can do the ashes now."

"Oh," he says, "you've got a little bit of ash on your forehead, by the way." Claire passes her hand over her brow but misses, and Castiel beckons her closer. She holds very still while he wipes the soot away, like Ash Wednesday in reverse. "There you go," he says when it's gone, and Claire smiles.

*******

After he's finished helping Claire clean the grill, she refuses to let him cook; instead, he's put in charge of assembly, tucking cooked hamburgers, hotdogs, and vegetarian stand-ins for both into buns and shuttling them over to Jody on cashier duty. He's been at this for about an hour when she taps him on the shoulder. "Hey, lemme take that over for a while, Father, you've got a visitor over yonder."

"I do?" Castiel sets down the tongs he's holding and turns to see Dean loitering near the cashier’s table, hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. Catching sight of him, Castiel finds himself unconsciously reaching up to put his hair in order; how much, he wonders, does he reek of charcoal and beef drippings right now? 

"Heya, Cas," says Dean cheerfully when Castiel draws near. "Thought I'd come get lunch for a good cause."

"Oh, you're not—I thought you might be here to see me."

Dean rubs the back of his neck. "Of course I'm here to see you, Cas. I don't _not_ wanna support the girls, though. Your niece is on the team, right?"

"Yes. Claire, she's the blonde one with braids," Castiel says, pointing. Dean's gaze flickers politely in Claire's direction, but he's looking back at Castiel almost immediately.

Dean steps closer to the table and drops his voice. "You look really hot in that apron," he says, and Castiel flushes. He'd forgotten he was even wearing this apron, emblazoned with the beginning of Exodus 16:12: "I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites; say to them, 'At twilight you shall eat meat.'" It's a thoroughly unerotic garment, a gift from a seminary professor, but Dean's still looking at him starry-eyed.

"I really wanna kiss you right now," Dean almost whispers. "I know you're on duty, though, got the uniform on," gesturing at Castiel's clerical collar; Castiel watches a bead of sweat trace down the side of Dean's neck and disappear beneath his T-shirt at the hollow of his throat. Where Dean's neck and shoulder meet, there remains a faint bruise left by Castiel's mouth the previous week, and that unprecedented want returns, sudden and visceral.

"I can kiss you," Castiel says, although even as he says it he's scanning the vicinity for witnesses. But there's no one nearby, the cashier's table being far enough from the grills to be out of the smoke but too far from full shade for people to linger after purchasing their food. "I can kiss you a little," he amends. "By which I mean closed-mouthed."

"No tongue, okay, that works for me," Dean says, leaning toward him over the table. "I just keep thinking about your mouth, Cas."

Castiel lays one hand on Dean's cheek and kisses him for approximately five seconds; it's a sweet kiss, a gentle kiss, a beautiful kiss.

And when Castiel pulls away and opens his eyes, Abby Sands is standing behind Dean, a look of shocked indignation on her pretty face.


	9. Chapter 9

“What are you doing here?” asks the redhead from Cas’s church, looking at Dean like he’s something stuck to the bottom of her shoe. “I thought you were an organ repairman, not—whatever’s going on here,” she says, gesturing between them. “Father Castiel, do you really think this is the time or the place for public displays of affection? Behave yourself.”

Dean bristles—he doesn't know who this lady is, but he's not gonna let her treat Cas like they'd been playing tonsil hockey in public, not when Cas has tried to be so thoughtful about the physical stuff. "Come on, lady, there wasn't anything wrong with that kiss and you know it," he says, scowling at her. 

She's not intimidated at all. "Is he your lover?" she asks Cas, who's just been standing there frozen since she showed up.

"That's none of your goddamn business," Dean growls, and Cas puts a hand on his arm.

"Dean, don't," he says. "Abby, I'm sorry, it won't happen again."

Dean tenses at this—Cas shouldn't be rolling over for this Abby, whoever she is—but Cas squeezes his arm in a silent plea, and so Dean's left with just standing there like a prize dumbass.

"Well," Abby says with a smile that makes Dean afraid she's gonna go for his throat, "I think I'll probably have a chat with Mother Naomi about the situation, just in case. She might have an opinion your bringing a lover to church functions." She spins on her heel—Dean's got no idea how she manages it, they're standing on grass—and walks away.

Cas sighs out a long breath and covers his face with his hands. "That could have gone better,” he mumbles.

"Yeah, she seems like a real rhymes-with-witch,” Dean says, and he’s a little proud of himself for remembering not to cuss, even if Cas keeps saying it’s okay. It’s the principle of the thing, dammit. Darn it.

“You can call her a bitch, Dean, I won’t correct you. Although I should, it’s misogynist.” Cas groans and hangs his head. “Oh God, Dean, what if she gets me fired?”

“Can she do that?”

Cas shakes his head. “Not on her own, but I don’t know what she’ll tell Naomi, and I don’t know Naomi well enough yet to know how she’ll react to it. The church is officially affirming, but it’s her parish, and this is Kansas.”

It sinks in that Dean got caught kissing a guy—a _priest,_ even, in his collar. Hell, maybe Abby had a point. If being with him is a threat to Cas’s job, Dean can’t be good for him, right? Even if Dean likes him a lot, and likes kissing him (Dean hasn’t done so much damn kissing since he was thirteen, and it’s kind of awesome, he thinks he’s even got a hickey or two) and can’t fucking wait to get to do more than that. Dating Cas is probably a mistake, and it’ll be easier to get out now.

He’s about to say something like “guess it’s not in the cards” when Cas grabs his arm again. “You drove here?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Wait here.” Cas has a quick chat with Jody Mills where she does a lot of nodding, and then he’s back, slipping his hand into Dean’s. “All right, she’s going to cover for me. You’re going to drive me home.”

“Oh…kay.” Dean goes with it, because Cas’s hand feels so good in his, solid and reassuring. They’ve barely gotten into the Impala when Cas pins Dean’s shoulders to his seat and kisses him hard, tongue pushing deep. Dean sighs into it and kisses back; he loves that Cas is rough with him, wants more of it, as much as Cas is willing to give him.

Just as suddenly, Cas pulls away. He locks eyes with Dean, lets one hand fall to Dean’s right knee, and very deliberately slides it up his thigh, up and up and over until Cas’s hand is _finally_ on his dick. “If I’m going to be fired for unbecoming sexual conduct, I may as well indulge in actually having sex with you. I don’t think the Almighty is going to begrudge me a blowjob.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean gasps, fumbling the key into the ignition. “Okay, let’s get you home.”

*******

Cas takes his hand out of Dean’s crotch on the drive, thank fuck, but he doesn’t retreat to the other side of the bench seat, either, sitting close enough to Dean to hold onto his thigh, his thumb stroking back and forth over the side seam of Dean’s jeans. Dean’s feeling kinda dizzy by the time they get there, either because he keeps catching himself holding his breath or because all the blood in the upper half of his body is heading for his dick at top speed—which ain’t even touching the look in Cas’s eyes, hungry and intent. He’s obviously been holding himself back more than Dean realized, because right now he looks like he wants to devour Dean.

Dean can’t wait.

Once they’re inside, Cas crowds him up against the back of the front door and pushes Dean’s shirt up over his stomach; Dean frantically pulls it the rest of the way off, hissing when Cas ducks his head to nip at Dean’s collarbone and lick at his nipples. “You gonna blow me right here, Cas?” he says. “Get on your knees?”

“I thought about it,” Cas says. His hands are moving restlessly over Dean’s bare torso, dipping down to grab Dean’s ass. “Is that what you want?”

“No,” Dean admits. As appealing a thought as it is, Cas being so hot for him he sucks him off in the entryway, that’s not the way Dean does things. “I wanna blow you first, can I?”

Pamela used to tell him he had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility cause of his fucked-up childhood, where his dad left raising Sam mostly to him; “try to be selfish more often,” she’d say, and he does try. But he always comes last, that’s the rule: he loves getting people off almost more than getting off himself, and earnest, dorky Cas when he’s going over the edge of orgasm—Dean wants to see that. He wants to _make that happen._

Maybe it’s a selfish impulse after all, then. Dean’ll analyze it later. Right now Cas is nodding, and Dean’s gonna suck his dick.

He takes Cas’s hand and leads him down the hall, past the bathroom that was as far as he went last time, to the bedroom. It’s warm and bright, even after Cas closes the blinds; like the rest of the apartment, it’s short on furniture, just a night table piled haphazardly with books and the bed, an unmade queen with blue-and-white-checked sheets. The bed’s all Dean needs, though, and he kisses Cas, steers him towards it while he tugs at the knot on Cas’s corny apron and takes it off. He thinks Cas thought he was kidding when he said it was hot, but Dean couldn’t see him in it without imagining him in _only_ it, and that’s a mental picture worth having.

Cas turns them around and gives a gentle shove to the center of Dean’s chest; Dean grins and flops backwards onto the bed, pulls Cas on top of him and starts unbuttoning his shirt—he’s not sure how to get the priest collar off, but Cas saves him the trouble, unsnapping it at the back of his neck and tossing it towards the bedside table. It bounces off the books and onto the floor. Dean feels a little guilty about that, until Cas’s shirt comes off and he’s distracted by all that skin he wants to touch and taste and learn.

“You’re so hard,” he murmurs, arching up into the solid weight of Cas’s dick bearing down, next to his own. He said the same thing the first time they made out, trying to put the brakes on—now it’s full speed ahead, Cas groaning into his ear and licking his throat, just like Dean told him he liked it, and Cas’s hips grinding on his. Dean could come like this, probably, as long as it’s been since he came with someone else (and it’s been longer than that since he came with someone he gave a shit about); so it takes a lot of effort to roll them over, suck at Cas’s nipples while he works his pants open.

Cas’s dick gets harder in his hand when he gets it out, and Cas lets out a quiet, awestruck “oh” that makes Dean feel like a god. He pumps his hand a few times, watches Cas’s eyelashes flutter. “Do you have condoms?” Dean asks. 

Cas just nods with a sheepish smile. “Hope springs eternal,” he says, then rolls over and gets a box of condoms out of the nightstand; Dean’s stomach flips at the sight of a bottle of lube on the shelf it came from. God, he hopes Cas eventually decides it’s not “unbecoming” to fuck him. 

One step at a time, though. Dean rolls the condom on slow, smirking while he holds eye contact. Cas’s eyes are glazed with lust, his hands tangled in the sheets.   
Dean backs off the bed onto his knees next to it and tugs Cas with him, gets his pants and boxers the rest of the way off. “I’m pretty good at this,” Dean says. He’s pretty sure it’s true, but hedges: “Solid B student.”

And then he doesn’t say anything for awhile. Latex tastes like ass—well, not like _ass_ ass, it’s gross, though—but Cas is hot in his mouth, and heavy, his rich scent is thick in Dean’s nose when he breathes in. Dean doesn’t try to have any fancy technique or anything; he knows enthusiasm goes a long way, and he’s just so fucking thrilled to be this close to Cas’s dick, to get his hands and his mouth on it, after a few minutes he doesn’t really think anymore about whether he’s knocking it out of the park. If the way Cas is moaning and grabbing at Dean’s hair is any indication, they’re both enjoying the hell out of this.

Cas throws his hips up when he comes, and Dean sucks him through it till Cas pushes him away, panting. Dean buries his face where his thigh meets his groin and just inhales—he doesn’t have words for how good Cas smells, like sweat, yeah, but amazing somehow instead of rank. He licks his way up to the notch of Cas’s hipbone and nibbles. “You good?”

Cas’s laugh is a little manic. “I’m very good, thank you. Give me a moment to collect myself and I can return the favor.”

“Okay,” says Dean, and then, looking somewhere over Cas’s shoulder, “you can throw me around some, if you want. I like that.”

“So I’ve gathered,” Cas says, raising an eyebrow. Dean’d be embarrassed if Cas didn’t look so excited. 

Cas gets up and stretches, ditches the condom in the wastebasket in the corner, and rounds the bed to where Dean’s still kneeling on the carpet. “Get up,” he commands, and when Dean does Cas pushes him over onto the bed again, hard enough that he bounces on the mattress.

“Fuck yes,” Dean says. 

And that’s all he says for awhile—Cas’s name probably makes it in there, but mostly Dean just goes near-wordless with pleasure, letting Cas get him naked and lay him out exactly like he wants him, push his shoulders beneath Dean’s knees and go to town. Cas goes down on him with single-minded purpose, playing Dean like an instrument; he’s definitely had more practice at this, barely seems to have a gag reflex, and he doesn’t limit himself to Dean’s dick, either, lifting Dean’s ass in both hands so he can swirl his tongue lower and lower. The noise that leaves Dean’s mouth when he does that isn’t one he’s ever heard himself make, but Cas raises his head long enough to grin at him in triumph before he swallows Dean’s dick again. Dean comes so hard his vision goes blurry for a second.

He lies blissful and slack in the aftermath; Cas stretches out beside him and pets his hair, plants a kiss to his temple. “Thank you, I enjoyed that very much,” says Cas. His voice is a little hoarse. 

“Anytime,” Dean says. He stands up, wobbly on weak knees, and deals with the condom, finds his jeans. “Uh, I’m gonna go have a cigarette if that’s okay?”

“Of course,” says Cas, “there’s a little patio out back, if you don’t want to put on a shirt.” He grins. “I’d rather you didn’t, FYI.”

So Dean has a smoke shirtless on Cas’s back patio, sitting in a sun-faded plastic Adironack chair and trying not to think too hard about what he’s just done—he reasons that his brains are still scrambled from orgasm, that if he allows even a whisper of doubt at this point he’s gonna freak out on Cas. Not because of the cocksucking, that was awesome, but because of how he’s wishing hard right now he’d stayed to snuggle for a while before getting up for a cigarette.   
He likes Cas a lot. He doesn’t wanna fuck this up.

Cas’s sort-of cat emerges from under a bush in the backyard and switches his tail at Dean; there’s twigs stuck in his dusty fur, and somehow he’s still looking at Dean like he’s the dirtbag. “Cut me some slack, pal,” he mutters, and he’s surprised when the cat trots over to him and hops up onto his lap, turning in a circle once and purring like a motorboat before settling down. It’s nice—he’ll need a Benadryl later, but for right now, just this moment, he’s content.

He can’t remember the last time he felt this way.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING:** homophobic remarks

On Sunday morning, Castiel wakes alone—but his sheets still smell like Dean, and he lets himself linger in bed after his alarm, luxuriating in sense-memory. He’d lured Dean in from the porch yesterday by standing at the back door wearing nothing but a smile, quickly coaxing him out from beneath an uncommonly affectionate Lucifer, who was sleeping so profoundly he left a puddle of drool of Dean’s jeans. Back in bed, Castiel stripped those jeans off, pushed Dean’s face into a pillow, and made him come again with tongue and fingers, while Dean yelped and writhed underneath him. They didn’t bother to dress for the rest of the afternoon; Castiel suggested ordering in eventually, when they simultaneously realized neither of them had eaten lunch, but Dean vetoed it, on the grounds that that would require someone to put on at least a robe, “and I’m not done seeing you naked.”

Instead, they grazed on the uninspiring contents of Castiel’s pantry and fridge: trail mix, string cheese, leftover Chinese. When Dean discovered a box of microwave kettle corn, he insisted on watching a movie, then put on a forgettable action flick they’d both seen and spent most of its runtime slowly, slowly working Castiel up to a truly spectacular orgasm. 

The summer sun had gone down by the time Dean rubbed the back of his neck and said, “I should probably get going, huh? You have church tomorrow.” He didn’t have to add _and you’ll definitely get fired if you’re late again because you were in bed with me._

Castiel gets a text as he’s brushing his teeth after breakfast—expecting Dean, he’s chagrined to see it’s from Naomi: **Please come see me in my office today at 2:00, Castiel. I’ve asked Deacon Gabriel and both wardens to be there as well.**

*******

Despite his re-commitment to punctuality, Castiel can’t bring himself to go near Naomi’s office until just after two, even knowing that this means everyone else will have likely arrived ahead of him. And indeed, when he opens her door after a ceremonial knock, all four people in the room turn to look directly at him: Naomi behind her still-piled desk, Gabriel lounging in one of those cozy armchairs, Abby perched primly on the other. Zachariah is standing in the only corner of the room the light doesn’t reach, glowering. The expressions on the faces of the others—well, they could go either way, Castiel thinks. Not knowing where to situate himself, he loiters near the door, his back against the edge of a bookshelf.

“Ms. Sands tells me your boyfriend showed up at the fundraising cookout yesterday,” says Naomi, interrupting Castiel’s internal loin-girding to speak first, “that she saw you kiss him.”

“Yes,” Castiel says, and Zachariah grunts disapprovingly. Gabriel unwraps a piece of chocolate, the crinkle of its foil like a fusillade in the otherwise silent room. “It wasn’t—I felt it was a measured display of affection, Ms. Sands did not, and for that I apologize. To all of you.” Hearing himself, Castiel’s stomach twists in shame; he knows he’s groveling, that he’s done nothing wrong—but if unnecessary apologies will keep him his job, he’s, apparently, willing to debase himself. 

Naomi shakes her head. “No, no, Castiel, I wasn’t finished. I don’t care about an innocent kiss. Oh, don’t make that face, Abby, you told me they were standing on opposite sides of a table, how obscene could it have been? You’ve just had your eye on Castiel since he first arrived and you’re embarrassed to realize you’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

If Abby were four decades older, Castiel suspects, she would be clutching her pearls—maybe exclaiming, “Well, I never!” As it is, though, he’s fairly certain her first instinct is to curse, because she opens her mouth to speak and then immediately snaps it shut. Naomi doesn’t wait for her to come up with a more diplomatic response. “What _is_ of potential concern to me, Castiel,” Naomi says, “is that I’m told the man you’re dating is also the mechanic who fixed the church organ. A Dean Winchester?”

“Yes,” says Castiel.

“Were you dating him when you asked me to hire him?”

“No. We didn’t even know each other—Jody Mills will vouch for that, she introduced us.”

“Well then,” Naomi says, “That’s all I really needed to know. I think we’re done here.”

Zachariah explodes, forcing his way between the armchairs and up to Naomi’s desk. “Are you kidding me? You can’t believe him. Of _course_ Castiel knew this Dean before you hired him, probably before you hired Castiel! This whole organ repair scheme has just been a way of misappropriating church funds to give to Castiel’s gay lover. He’s an embezzler, at best, and at worst a target for blackmail because of his lifestyle. I demand you fire him.”

It’s been a blessedly long time since anyone said “gay” in Castiel’s presence with that particular inflection in their voice, and his fingers and toes are suddenly cold and tingling with fear, his mouth too dry to speak. But Naomi speaks for him: “I’m not firing Father Castiel,” she says firmly. “In fact, I suggest you apologize for accusing him of thievery and implying there’s anything sinful about his ‘lifestyle.’ Unless you think the canons of the church are wrong.”

Zachariah raises a fist, and Gabriel leaps up from his chair to grab his elbow. “Don’t ever threaten her again, Adler,” he says. “Or Father Castiel, for that matter. She was right to defend him, he’s a good man.” He shoots Castiel a smile over his shoulder. “If not punctual.”

“I was only going to hit her desk,” Zachariah says, sulky as a child as he shakes Gabriel off. “I can see it’s useless to try reasoning with a woman. Father Michael would never have stood for any of this.” _Does he really think he’s being reasonable?_ Castiel wonders. 

“Yes, well,” and she smiles, implacable, “he’s not the rector anymore, is he? God rest his soul. I am, and I’m not going to fire Castiel. Do with that what you will, Mr. Adler.”

“Then I resign as warden—I’m sure Ms. Sands will join me, she’s as concerned as I am about your leadership so far—and you’ll lose your best liaisons with your congregation because you insisted on making things political.” 

Naomi actually laughs at him. “Have you read the Gospels lately, Mr. Adler? Christianity _is_ political—if you don’t like that, you should take it up with Jesus, not with me. But I do accept your resignation—if you’re unable to accept Father Castiel, you shouldn’t be warden to begin with. Ms. Sands, are you stepping down as well?”

Her face composed, Abby allows the attention of the room to settle on her while she changes the cross of her legs, resettles her skirt. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” she says at last, and continues over Zachariah’s sputtering, “if you recall, Mother Naomi, I never objected to the gender of Father Castiel’s significant other, just his unexpected presence at the barbecue. That’s been settled to my satisfaction, I don’t see any reason to deprive the vestry of my leadership.” 

“A responsible decision,” Naomi says, and one corner of her mouth quirks up. “After all, the senior wardenship just became open, and we’ll need qualified candidates.” 

Zachariah storms out. Naomi dismisses the others, asking Castiel to remain; he collapses into an armchair when she beckons him forward and heaves a sigh. “I can’t thank you enough,” he says. “I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I really didn’t expect you to go to bat for me like that.” 

“Let me guess, you’re not sure if I like you?” He nods, and she smiles ruefully. “I’m not a naturally friendly person, Castiel, but I’m a woman in authority, so I have to fake it with parishioners or risk getting labeled a cold, humorless bitch. Not that some of them don’t think that anyway. I do like you, though. And I think you’re a good priest, not despite your sexuality, but because of it. It's why I hired you, in part.” 

Castiel frowns. “You hired me because I was gay?” 

“I hired you because I’m bisexual,” says Naomi. 

“Oh.” Castiel blinks. _“Oh.”_

“Yes.” Naomi looks down at her desk and starts bending the corner of a manila folder back and forth. “I’m married to a man, so it’s not obvious, but it’s important to me to make this church as welcoming as I can—and the diocese, too, that’s why I’ve been so busy for the convention. I’m on the committee making recommendations about how to serve the local LGBT community.” She looks up again and fixes Castiel’s eyes with her own, her face grave and joyous as a saint’s. “But I want to start at Grace, with you. Do you remember what you felt, the first time you took the Eucharist from the hands of an out queer priest? We can be that, our parish, for people. We can give them a seat at the Lord’s table that they’re too often denied.” 

“Yes,” says Castiel, “I want that too. Why haven’t you talked to me about this before?" 

“I meant to, but I’ve just been so busy. And I kept putting it off. When Abby Sands came to me to complain about your kissing Dean at the cookout—and don’t look so apologetic, Castiel, I know you didn’t do anything inappropriate, your niece was there, for Heaven’s sake. No, I did want to ask you about your prior relationship with Dean, so I decided it was a natural point to broach the subject. And I called the others here in order to demonstrate what will and won’t be tolerated here as long as I’m rector.” 

Castiel grins at her. “Relieved you’ll be spending less time in the future tolerating Zachariah Adler?” 

She grins back, more relaxed than he’s ever seen her, and throws her hands in the hair. “Thanks be to God!” 

******* 

Castiel texts Dean on his walk home, euphoric. **It’s over. Turns out I had nothing to worry about.**

**really?** Dean replies immediately; he’s probably been on tenterhooks since Castiel told him about the meeting this morning. **u still got a job?**

**Yes. And a bisexual boss who likes me. I’m really looking forward on working with her to make Grace an affirming parish for queer people.**

**thats fuckin great, dude! what ru doin now, wanna celebrate?** This is followed by a winking emoji, and Castiel feels a dizzying rush of blood southward. 

**Is that intended to be a sext, Dean?**

**youll know when im sexting u, cas. rn im just askin if u wanna come over?**

**I would love to. Tell me where you live.**

When Castiel arrives at Dean’s house—a weatherbeaten bungalow with a dozen precipitous front steps—a man who must be his brother, Sam, opens the door. They don’t resemble each other much except in height; Sam is a head taller than Castiel, and his hair is long for a lawyer’s, although at his age he’ll be low-ranking enough it might not matter. “So you’re the hot priest!” is the first thing he says, sounding absolutely delighted by the prospect. 

“Um, yes, I suppose that’s me,” Castiel says, flustered, as Dean comes hurrying out from the depths of the house and wrenches the doorknob out of Sam’s hand. 

“That’s enough outta you, Sammy,” Dean says. “You’re lucky you’re even meeting him already, okay? This ain’t easy for me.” 

“Sorry,” Sam says, although his grin is unrepentant. He pushes his hair out of his face, most of it slipping right back over his forehead, and offers a hand to shake. “It’s good to meet you, Castiel, come on in. Dean talks about you a lot.” 

“Likewise, Sam. I’ve heard a good amount about you as well.” 

“We done here?” Dean says. His scowl does little to conceal his nervousness; even after closing the door behind Castiel, he’s still holding tightly onto the front doorknob, shifting it back and forth. The works inside click rhythmically. 

“I guess,” Sam says, and disappears through a doorway on the left, calling after him: “But if you’re taking him to your bedroom, you know the rules: door open, one foot on the floor at all times!” 

“I swear to God, Sammy, I will cut your hair while you sleep!” Dean yells in his wake, then turns to Castiel. “Sorry he ambushed you like that. He’s so excited I’m dating a dude, the kid’s like my own personal pride parade.” 

“He’s fine,” Castiel says. “My own brothers stopped talking to me when I came out, so I can stand a little good-natured teasing.” Bold, he moves into Dean’s space, walks him back into the edge of the banister to the second story. _“Are_ we going to your room?” 

Dean bites his lip and nods. “Yeah, if you want. It’s upstairs.” He goes first, ostensibly to lead the way, but Castiel suspects Dean knows he enjoys the view; Dean’s ass is spectacular, and Castiel hopes to bury his face in it shortly. “So I guess that’s why you don’t talk about your family, huh?” Dean asks. 

“They’re not my family,” Castiel says. “I don’t want to talk about them.” 

“Okay.” Dean loiters in the doorway to his room while Castiel enters, then closes the door behind them. “What do you wanna talk about instead?” 

“I don’t want to talk at all,” says Castiel. “This time I do want to be on my knees.” 


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING:** mentions of past child abuse

Dean wakes with a start and in a sweat. It’s the middle of the afternoon—he can hear the neighbor kids making a ruckus outside—and he’s wrapped around Cas in bed, a leg and an arm thrown over him, his nose wedged into Cas’s armpit. They’re both still naked, and their skin’s sticking to each other in a way that’s kind of gross, but also kind of not, and Cas is wide awake, watching him. “Hey,” Dean says, hoarsely. “How long was I out?”

“Half an hour,” says Cas, brushing his fingers through Dean’s damp hair. “You dropped off about thirty seconds after you came.”

“Mmm.” Dean rolls onto his back and stretches, curling his toes into the sheets and reaching up to grip the headboard. “Yeah, that one took a lot out of me. You haven’t just been lying here watching me sleep, though, right?”

“Well, I closed my eyes for a few minutes myself, but you were very insistent about cuddling, especially when you were unconscious, so I was somewhat trapped.”

“So much for preserving my dignity, sorry. Been a while since I fell asleep with anyone, I guess I fell back on old habits. Did I snore?” Cas nods, Dean groans. Lisa had been a champ about Dean’s sleep clinginess when Ben was little, but once the kid wasn’t bothering them at night she admitted Dean kept her up just as much. They’d slept in separate rooms for most of their marriage, and it worked really well for them until it didn’t—in fact, he’s sure they’d have broken up a lot earlier if they’d stuck to the idea that married people had to share a bed.

“It’s all right, you’re beautiful when you sleep,” Cas says, and lays his hand over Dean’s heart.

Dean catches it in one of his own and brings it to his lips, kissing Cas’s knuckles. What’s he supposed to do with that, being called _beautiful?_ Besides pretend he hasn’t heard it. “Yeah, you say that now, wait till you stay over, you’ll be singing a different tune.”

“I can’t,” says Cas. “Wait, that is.”

They make out for a while, sprawled diagonally across the bed. Dean’s hard again right away, but he’s pretty sure another orgasm like that would knock him out till morning, and he’d rather be conscious while Cas is around; touching him in his sleep isn’t nearly as good as doing it awake, and being touched and kissed in turn. Maybe in a little while they can put their clothes on and see what Sammy’s up to, watch a movie or something.

Dean doesn’t really remember what it feels like to fall in love, and even if he did, he was just a kid then; he doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be like, falling in love as an adult, whether he can trust the lightness he feels in his chest when Cas is around, so different from the hollow that was there before. The odds are against the first guy he dates being Mr. Right. He knows this. But he can’t keep his guard up around Cas, can’t keep the distance that would keep his heart safe—and the strangest thing is, he’s happy about it. Fucking terrified, sure, but happy to let Cas in.

“Oh,” Cas says during a lull in activities, “I forgot to tell you, I talked to Claire, and it made me think about your situation with Ben.”

Dean frowns. “How so?”

“Well, there’s similarities, aren’t there?” Cas sits up, his face suddenly animated. “Both of us feeling such guilt over abandoning children in our lives. And I’m wondering, now that I know that Claire’s never felt that way, whether it might not be the same with Ben—that there’s another reason he’s being standoffish, that he’s not angry at you. I think you should keep trying to talk to him. Don’t give up.”

There’s a lump in Dean’s throat he can’t swallow, and he tugs the sheet up over his dick, curling in on himself. “I didn’t actually ask you for advice, Cas.”

“I didn’t realize it was a taboo subject.”

“It’s not that, it’s just—it ain’t the _same,_ Cas, not at all. Ben’s my _son._ I raised him, he’s got my eyes and my freckles. You never had that with Claire, you didn’t abandon her, and you don’t fucking understand.”

“I’m sorry,” says Cas, reaching out for him. “I’m trying to empathize and offer comfort.”

Dean flinches away. “And I’m saying, don’t treat me like one of your fucking flock, Cas!” Cas sits back on his heels, wide-eyed. Dean can’t look him in the face and ends up staring at his dick, and he really wishes they weren’t having this conversation naked. 

“I should go,” Cas says. His voice doesn’t rise, but Dean knows it’s a question.

“Yeah, I think you should.” Dean gets up and throws his robe on, fast, and goes to hide in the bathroom until he hears the front door close and knows Cas is gone.

Thirty seconds later, Sam’s tapping on the bathroom door. “You wanna talk about this?”

“I’m never gonna say yes to that question, Sammy!”

“I’m not going to stop asking, though.”

Dean knows he won’t—the kid was relentless when he was five years old and kept asking Dean why they didn’t have a mom, and now he’s a damn lawyer—so Dean gives up and flings the door open. “We’re going outside so I can smoke, and you’re not gonna whine about it,” he mutters. “And I’m putting on pants.”

On the patio, Sam folds himself into a chair that’s too small for him while Dean lights up, leaning against the sliding glass door. It’s warm against his back from the hot day. Sam lets him get through half a cigarette before clearing his throat to ask, “You fought with Castiel?”

“I guess.” Dean sighs and explains. “He was trying to help, I know that, but it pissed me off. It ain’t the same, Sam.”

“No, it’s not,” Sam agrees. “He was out of line, but—”

“Swear to God, Sammy, if you’re gonna tell me he had a point—”

“No! No, I think he’s totally off base, in fact. I was going to ask if you wanted my advice. Not about Castiel, about Ben.”

Of course Dean doesn’t want his advice—it’s not like Sam’s got a kid either, what does he know? He needs some dad friends. On the other hand, of the two kids Dean’s raised, Sam’s the one still talking to him, so maybe he’s got insight from that side. “Okay, fine, tell me,” Dean says. “What do you think I should do?”

Sam doesn’t answer right away, and when Dean raises an eyebrow and gestures at him to get on with it, he makes a face. “Promise not to get mad.”

“Love it when conversations start with that.”

“I’m just asking you to hear me out, okay?” Sam says. He sounds so goddamn sincere; this must be his “my client is innocent, Your Honor,” voice.

Dean rubs his hand across his face. “Okay. Shoot.”

“So remember when I was a kid, how whenever Dad made us switch towns again, I’d give him the silent treatment for a while.”

Dean’s stomach lurches. “Jesus fucking Christ, Sammy, are you comparing me to _Dad?”_

“You promised you wouldn’t get mad!”

“I’m not mad, I’m fucking hurt! I know I’m a drunk, too, but I don’t beat the shit out of people I love about it. I thought you thought better of me than that.”

“I do,” says Sam. “Of course I do! All I’m comparing here is how I wouldn’t talk to him. And you remember what he’d do, right?”

Dean nods. “Yeah, he wouldn’t leave you alone.” He’d tell Sammy over and over what a disrespectful shit he was, a disgrace of a son, a waste of his hard-earned money. Eventually, Sam always broke, screamed at his father and got slapped; that would be that, until John Winchester lost another job and uprooted their lives again.

“Right. I wanted him to let me have my hurt, but instead he kept chipping away at it until it was rage. And here’s where the comparison stops, because even if he’d gotten that part right, he’d still have been a shitty dad, and you’re not a shitty dad. So you can do for Ben what Dad should’ve done for me and just give him space.”

“You think I shouldn’t even try to talk to him? I don’t know, Sammy. Won’t he just think I’m mad at him?”

“Well, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try at all, but I think you’ve got room to back off. You’ve been calling Lisa’s more since Ben stopped coming to the phone than before, Dean, you know that? I think you should lay off the pressure and let him come back to you he’s ready. Because he will, Dean—he loves you, and he knows how hard you’ve worked to change since the divorce. We all do.” Sam says this with such conviction, Dean almost believes it. 

“Well, fuck,” says Dean. “You make some good points. Makes more sense than what Cas was saying, anyway. Don’t suppose you got some bright ideas on that front?”

“Nah, you got this one,” Sam says. He stands up and thumps Dean on the shoulder, twice. “Thanks for letting me meet him, Dean. I hope I see him again sometime.”

Dean claims the chair after Sam goes inside and smokes for a while, thinking. He’s not really mad at Cas anymore—his heart’s in the right place, even if his people skills could use some work. But Dean knows Ben is angry with him, because he knows his kid; Sam’s idea about backing off is probably the right one. Hell, didn’t Lisa say close to the same thing, last time they talked? He should text her tomorrow.

Cas, though. Dean could text Cas, too, to let him know he’s cooled off; he could even wait until tomorrow. . Instead, Dean puts his shoes on, grabs his keys, and drives straight to Cas’s house.

Where Cas isn’t, apparently, though his truck’s parked outside—Dean’s knocks go unanswered, and there’s no movement behind the half-open blinds of the living room. It doesn’t seem like Cas’s style to hide in his house and ignore the front door, even if he knows it’s Dean. That’s Dean’s style, or it used to be, and that’s a big reason why he’s here. He was expecting Cas to be home, though, and he’s got no plan B.

So he sits on the stoop and has a cigarette, and then another. After a while Lucifer appears and gives him a dirty look, then drapes his front legs over Dean’s thigh and pushes his head into Dean’s hand for petting. Dean scritches the Devil’s ears and smokes and waits for Cas.

He thinks it’s about twenty minutes until Cas comes home, and he’s surprised to see Claire with him; she’s carrying a pizza box, Cas has plastic grocery bags in both hands. They both seem so happy and relaxed Dean feels shitty about showing up to cause drama—but it’s too late, Cas sees him and stops in his tracks. Then, saying something to Claire first that Dean can’t hear, Cas crosses the rest of the space between them much faster than he was walking before, his long, muscular legs taking him across the distance in a few seconds. “Dean,” he says, “what are you doing here?”

Dean glances nervously at Claire, who’s catching up with an unimpressed look on her face—figures a teenage girl would have Dean’s number. “I didn’t think our conversation was finished, so I came to…do that,” he says to Cas.

“Oh.” Cas’s eyes flick between Claire and Dean a few times before he nods. “Okay. Claire, would you mind taking the food inside and I’ll be in in a few minutes?”

“Um, sure,” she says. Cas unlocks the door for her, and she brushes past Dean with the pizza box; Dean’s stomach rumbles at the herb-and-garlic smell of it. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, too busy worrying, then fucking, then worrying again. “C’mon, Luci, you want some dinner?” Claire coos in a baby voice, holding the door ajar, and the cat abandons Dean immediately.

“I didn’t expect to see you here after I screwed up so badly,” Cas says, sitting down on the stoop, a bag of groceries between them like a chaperone. “I’m so sorry Dean, I overstepped. I treated you like a parishioner who’d come to me for advice, not my—not you.”

When Dean and Sammy were kids, they’d argued about what superpower was the best; Sam always wanted something boring like flying or telekinesis, Dean wanted adamantine claws and access to the Batcave. Right now, though, Dean would choose mind-reading, because he’s dying to know how Cas really wanted to finish that sentence. The possibilities raise prickles on his skin.

“Apology accepted,” he says, and hears Cas breathe out in relief. “I screwed up, too, shouldn’t’ve run away. I still wanna run, Cas, I ain’t gonna lie. But I came here to talk to you, instead, because I like you so much it’s worth it.”

“I like you too, Dean.” Cas reaches over the groceries and rests his hand on Dean’s knee, palm up. Dean slips his fingers between Cas’s own and leans over to kiss him; it’s not for long, but it’s enough. Cas is enough—and by some miracle, it seems like Dean might be enough for him.

“Stay for dinner?” Cas asks. 

“Claire won’t mind?”

“I think she’ll appreciate the opportunity to gloat. According to her, I had ‘heart eyes’ as soon as you showed up to fix the van.” 

“Did you, now.” Dean moves the grocery bag and scoots right up next to Cas. “I think I know the look she means.” 

They don’t stop kissing this time until Claire comes out to tell them the pizza’s getting cold.


	12. Epilogue

In the past six months, Castiel has grown accustomed to sharing a bed with Dean—to wake up in the morning, as he does now, with their legs entwined, one of Dean’s arms thrown across his middle, Dean’s face smashed against his shoulder. Dean’s unconscious clinginess has only increased, but Castiel’s become adept at disentangling himself without rousing Dean, when necessary; right now, though, it’s snuggling weather, and instead Castiel rolls further into Dean’s embrace, tucks both hands down the back of Dean’s pajama pants, and indulges himself in watching Dean sleep. 

Their relationship is still so new, relatively speaking, but Castiel knows that he’s in love; although they’ve only said it out loud a few times, Castiel hears it color every word he speaks to Dean, feels as if he writes it on Dean’s skin with every touch. It’s easy, being with Dean. They like each other as much as they want each other, a balance that’s been off in Castiel’s past relationships, and they’ve intertwined their lives: Castiel ran a 10K with Sam back in October, and while Dean’s declined to appear at another church function, they take Claire to the movies now and then, and Dean taught her how to change a tire.

Castiel’s life now feels like an answered prayer. Like a miracle—not the showy, Biblical kind where water becomes wine, but the ordinary, persistent kind when night dawns into day. 

After a while, Dean’s eyes flutter open. “Hey, hot stuff,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes. “Trying to start something, grabbing my ass like that?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘like that,’” Castiel says, running his thumbs down Dean’s tailbone. Dean’s ass fits the spread of his hands so well, like they were made to fit that way. “Or what I could possibly be trying to start, since you were asleep until a few seconds ago.”

“Yeah, yeah, Mr. Innocent, is that your halo in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Dean’s smiling, his body yielding in Castiel’s hands as he pushes back into his touch, hooks a leg over Castiel’s hip to pull their groins closer.

“I’m always happy to see you, Dean.” Their lips press together in a morning kiss with only the barest hint of tongues; Castiel’s fingers make their way between Dean’s legs, pressing and stroking. Dean whimpers when Castiel takes his mouth away. “But you’re right, I had an ulterior motive. As I recall, you had requested birthday intercourse?”

“Is it my birthday?” Dean seems genuinely surprised for a moment. “I mean, absolutely you can fuck me. That sounds awesome.” He shoves Castiel’s T-shirt up past his ribs, starts working open the drawstring of his pajama pants.

Castiel puts his hand gently over Dean’s to stop him. “No. This morning I’m doing all the work,” he says firmly. “As the birthday boy, your only job is to enjoy yourself, and as your partner, I have the enviable task of ensuring your maximum enjoyment.”

“Your pillow talk is so weird, Cas, just say you’re gonna eat my ass and fuck my brains out.”

“I hardly need to, you’ve put it so eloquently.” He pulls Dean’s pants to his knees, reaches between them to trace the length of Dean’s cock. “Now, roll over.”

Dean grins and bites his lip. “Make me.”

So Castiel does. He makes Dean keen and gasp and arch, writhe and pant and come first—a hard-won battle, but worth it. When it’s over, Dean lies spent and blissful beneath him: Castiel takes a second to catch his breath and heads to the bathroom to grab something to clean up with—usually they throw down a towel before anal, and his sheets are a bit of a mess.

Dean’s phone rings while Castiel’s coming back down the hall, and is still ringing when he enters the room; Dean hasn’t budged. “Are you going to answer that?” Castiel asks as he hands off a wet washcloth. “It’s your birthday, someone probably wants to sing to you.”

“I guess.” Dean wipes off his hands and grabs his phone off the nightstand—and at the sight of the screen, the color drains from his face. Sitting up, he answers the call, his voice shaking: “Hello? Ben?”


End file.
